Books + Guides

Risk management is no longer confined solely to risk management specialists. Stakeholders ranging from employees to investors must understand how to quantify the tradeoffs of risk against the potential return. The failure to understand the essential nature of risk can have devastating consequences.

Globally renowned risk and corporate governance experts Michel Crouhy, Dan Galai, and Robert Mark have updated and streamlined their bestselling professional reference Risk Management to introduce you to the world of risk management without requiring you to know the intricate formulas and mathematical details.

The Essentials of Risk Management is the first book to make even the most sophisticated risk management approaches simultaneously accessible to both risk and non risk professionals. It will help you to:

• Increase the transparency of your risk management program to satisfy shareholders, employees, regulators, and other important constituencies
• Keep on top of the continuing evolution of best-practice risk policies and methodologies and associated risk infrastructures
• Implement and efficiently communicate an organization-wide Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approach that encompasses market, credit, liquidity, operational, legal and regulatory, business, strategic and reputation risks
• Navigate thorny areas including risk policies, risk methodologies, economic capital, regulatory capital, performance measurement, asset-liability management, and more
• Efficiently allocate limited corporate resources to comply with the new generation of risk regulation and corporate governance regulation

As a non-risk professional or board member, you are being called on more than ever before to make sophisticated assessments of your organization's risk exposures as well as play a critical role in its formal risk management process. The Essentials of Risk Management tells you what you need to know to succeed in this challenging new environment.

This plain-English guide explains the common types of options and helps you choose the right ones for your investing needs. You find out how to weigh option costs and benefits, combine options to reduce risk, and build a strategy that allows you to gain no matter what the market may bring. You’ll learn the basics of market and sector analysis and what to look for when trying out a new option strategy. You’ll also find what you need to know about options contract specifications and mechanics. Discover how to:

• Understand option contracts and orders
• Determine and manage your risk
• Guard your assets using options
• Trade options on securities exchanges
• Protect your rights and satisfy your contract obligations
• Target sectors using technical analysis
• Minimize potential losses and optimize rewards
• Map out your plan of attack
• Limit your downside when trading the trend
• Combine options to limit your position risk
• Benefit from exchange traded funds
• Key in on volatility for trading opportunities
• Capitalize on sideways movements

Trading options is serious business. Trading Options For Dummies gives you the expert help you need to succeed.

• You're self-employed, an independent contractor, or your employer doesn't provide health insurance (you can probably get coverage on your own for about $94/month—a fraction of what an employer would have to pay for the same coverage)
• You are employed and pay extra to cover your spouse or children under your employer-sponsored plan—you may save 50% by taking them off your employer plan
• You own a small business and are getting killed by double-digit premium increases—you can now give employees tax-free money to buy their own plans and get your company out of the health insurance business

The book also explains in detail the best solutions for you if:

• You can't find affordable health insurance because you or a child have an expensive preexisting medical problem (your state has a program to provide you with guaranteed coverage )
• You're currently putting money into an IRA or a 401(k)—because you don't realize that an HSA is always a better option
• You're unsure how you or your parents will be able to afford health insurance during retirement, or how to maximize benefits from Medicare—including the new Part D prescription drug plan

The New Health Insurance Solution is the definitive guide to the new ways every American can now get affordable health care—without an employer.

PAUL ZANE PILZER is a world-renowned economist, a former advisor in two White House administrations, an entrepreneur/employer, an award-winning adjunct professor at NYU, and a New York Times bestselling author.

In his best-selling Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller cautioned that society's obsession with the stock market was fueling the volatility that has since made a roller coaster of the financial system. Less noted was Shiller's admonition that our infatuation with the stock market distracts us from more durable economic prospects. These lie in the hidden potential of real assets, such as income from our livelihoods and homes. But these ''ordinary riches,'' so fundamental to our well-being, are increasingly exposed to the pervasive risks of a rapidly changing global economy. This compelling and important new book presents a fresh vision for hedging risk and securing our economic future.

Shiller describes six fundamental ideas for using modern information technology and advanced financial theory to temper basic risks that have been ignored by risk management institutions--risks to the value of our jobs and our homes, to the vitality of our communities, and to the very stability of national economies. Informed by a comprehensive risk information database, this new financial order would include global markets for trading risks and exploiting myriad new financial opportunities, from inequality insurance to intergenerational social security. Just as developments in insuring risks to life, health, and catastrophe have given us a quality of life unimaginable a century ago, so Shiller's plan for securing crucial assets promises to substantially enrich our condition.

Once again providing an enormous service, Shiller gives us a powerful means to convert our ordinary riches into a level of economic security, equity, and growth never before seen. And once again, what Robert Shiller says should be read and heeded by anyone with a stake in the economy.