Leveraged Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Loans, Bonds, and Other High-Yield Instruments (McGraw-Hill Financial Education Series)

This book is an excellent guide for all readers. Clear and concise explanations of how credit markets work and the instruments that drive them. The chapters are segmented by financial product and written by an expert in that particular discipline, which gives the reader exposure to different authors. One of the best leveraged finance books I've read.

Ok. It's not an easy Sunday beach read, but it does cover complex financial products in a fairly understandable way

Very comprehensive, not terribly technical, excellent summary/overview material. Book description and reviews helped me a lot. Would recommend it to folks fairly new to the LF space.

What I found most frustrating was that each chapter is written by different people, meaning you have a disjointed read from one chapter to the next with a huge amount of duplication and contradiction. It's also a very high level basic read, so enough to give a broad idea of the functioning of the leveraged finance markets but little else. Would be most helpful to students or people with little to no experience of financial markets who are interested in Lev Fin. It does not really provide much use to those already in the markets or looking to switch into Lev Fin. Could do with an update as most of the book was written pre-GFC and there have been many changes since (it could be that I'm reading an older edition).

Very interesting read

I have been a high yield fund manager in Europe of over twelve years, and studied High Yield with Theodore Barnhill at The George Washington University.Maxwell & Shenkman's Leveraged Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Loans, Bonds, and Other High-Yield Instruments is a welcome update of material previously covered in the now outdated "High Yield Bonds" by Barnhill, Shenkman and Maxwell.For buy-side high yield fund managers the ubiquitous and peripatetic Sam DeRosa-Farag and Martin Fridson were typically the sage voices of analysis, while academics such as Edward Altman championed the asset class, and Paul Asquith more cautiously demonstrated the misinterpretation of the Hickman study that started Milken's career. Gradually the asset class that would not go away and launched a billion private equity deals became the subject of wide professional and academic interest.Contributors to this volume analyze the major high-yield products, examine alternative credit risk measurements, and outline ways to trade and manage high-yield assets. Also covered is the work out worlds of debtor-in-possession financing and distressed investing.The battle of Moody's, Barra, and KMV is covered here, but not with the thoroughness of the folks who followed the blow-by-blow acquisition of and defense from the inside on the quantitative finance bulletin boards like Willmott and Nuclearphynance. The Moody's KMV Expected Default model is claimed to be "the most widely used quantitative credit model around the world." Quite a claim for a simple unbounded extension of the Merton-Black model of volatility and spreads on a time series, but what the heck.The financial crisis of 2008 highlighted and called into question the competence of the nationally recognized statistical rating agencies (NSRSOs). But few know how the agencies go about their proprietary method of rating the creditworthiness of individual companies. Leveraged Financial Markets gives us a peak but naturally with a bit of caution as those fat fees for a rating pay for plenty of lawyers. It is said that confidentiality agreements from the big three for ex-employees would make the devil tremble.Credit review typically involves both fundamental analysis and credit models. Fundamental analysis is slow and subjective, but investors demand analysis that is timely and accurate, so "quantitative risk models have gained widespread appeal and are now used to assess credit risk across a broad range of borrowers from large Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and consumers." So the book examines some of the bigger more recognized pieces on credit risk models are intended to measure the probability of default. Most fall into two categories: accounting-based, such as the Altman Z-score model, and market-based, such as Moody's KMV (a company Moody's acquired in 2002) EDF (expected default frequency) model. There are blended models as well, but most are discredited and folks tend to be almost religious about which they will play with. Most CDS's use Merton-Black-KMV approach since they are trading nearly continuously, while long term investors like pension and insurance firms take the accounting and fundamental approach. Sadly, there is a bit of non differentiation on which is useful for which and why.Naturally, with any collected work you have to be selective. Is there stuff missing here? Yes, I would have included Asquith's paper because no one cites it enough. Work on differing equity sponsors also needs more attention (the ten-minutes after the deal closes equity cushion disappearing in a PIK is an old story, leaving only your money on the table, and famously abused by certain private equity sponsors).But all in all, this is a good book for professionals in the field who don't want to wade through the disparate sources of all the thoughts and research presented here, or also a very good introduction and insight into the fascinating world of high yield bonds and leveraged finance for a beginner or MBA student anxious to get into the field.

Great book to read

I was able to get a pretty good understanding of many of the modern derivatives and high yield bonds from this book. I highly recommend it for the investor.