Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Bruce Tuckman's Fixed Income Securities deserves its reputation earned from both academics and practitioners as a practical yet rigorous introduction to fixed income markets. Written by a well-respected practitioner, Tuckman's book bridges the gap between the elementary, dry, and overly detailed books on the subject (if you think I'm referring to books in the Fabozzi tradition, you're correct) and the more quantitatively rigorous books written from either an quantitative analyst/developer's point of view.
In any event, Tuckman address topics of importance to everyone in these markets, from quants to traders in various bond and interest rate markets. He starts with the basic topics that any advanced introduction to Fixed Income markets should contain, such as basic measures of yield and risk (basic discounting conventions and "Z"-factors, duration/DV01, convexity) as well as the spot and forward market rates.
He also covers basic topics in applied modeling, such as curve fitting and parameter estimation - advanced undergrads and MBA students can easily implement the basic ideas in Excel to gain an intuitive understanding of rigorous fixed income analysis. A benefit of this approach, based on my standpoint as a practitioner, is that students need to realize the lack of good data in fixed income markets is a tremendous obstacle for pricing and risk analysis. Emphasizing this topic early keeps the audience mindful that data issues and statistical techniques used to deal with them are certainly not trivial.
In the middle of the book, Tuckman introduces modern fixed-income modeling methods by using the standard binomial approach to demonstrate the basic princples of risk-neutral pricing and option valuation. He also covers the trinomial approach, which while more complicated, is more valuable to practitioners calibrating their models to incorporate mean-reverting effects, as well as the standard short-rate (affine) models. While this book does have a few stochastic differential equations, their inclusion is meant only to encourage intuitive thinking about the interest rate processes and their connection with the tree framework.
More advanced topics, written to minimize the use of quantitative methods, include term structure volatility and is designed to teach the necessary ideas and conventions one needs before tackling modern Market Models such as BGM/J, as well as estimation techniques, options/swaps, and pricing and risk of MBS. Despite an academic background, Tuckman is careful to emphasize both the language and quantitative "hand-waving" done by traders and other practitioners who work in real markets. He also includes "case studies" that share his experiences on the trading floor in the context of the relevant material.
I would strongly recommend this book for those wishing to gain an intuitive understanding of the issues facing practitioners from a quantitative viewpoint. The book does not address many important topics, even at a rudimentary level, such as credit risk and other structured products. Nonetheless, Tuckman's book offers a relatively complete, rigorous introduction to fixed income analysis at a basic level - there are many great books of varying degrees of rigor and detail that cover credit risk, securitization, etc. For those familiar with the ideas in Tuckman and that have a solid grasp of the machinery of mathematical finance, Brigo/Mercurio, Cairns, and Rebonato have books that cover modern Market Models in more detail; the level of mathematical sophistication necessary to understand these models and the technical skill to implement them extends beyond the basic calculus and Excel skills needed for Tuckman's book.
As a parting shot, I'll note the reviewer that criticized Tuckman for being an "adjunct" professor. Tuckman was a prop trader at Salomon before making MD at a top bank, and is well-respected by academics for his practical knowledge of Fixed Income markets - hence the glowing endorsements from Longstaff and Musiela on the back cover. Tuckman's book isn't desgined to be a survey of academic literature, but a guide for students, fixed income PM's, traders, and risk managers on the quantitative aspects of real-world practice - most of the fixed-income universe doesn't know, need to know, or care about no-arbitrage models, stochastic calculus, or advanced statstical methods.
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