14 practitioner guides by Julian R. Sterling, best read first at the top. Each one is built on a single worked case, and every figure it prints is a live formula in a free workbook.
The quickest way into corporate finance, valuation and markets is Asset Management, the most read title in this list. The others go deeper into one job or one asset each. Every book below has a free companion page with the workbooks, so the arithmetic can be checked before the book is bought.
A Practitioner's Guide to Mandates, Performance, and What the Client Actually Earned
The four workbooks behind Asset Management: the four returns on one set of inputs, time-weighted against money-weighted with the flows editable, Brinson attribution that reconciles, and the fee schedule against a passive counterfactual.
Worked example: Why is our money-weighted return lower than the manager's time-weighted return?
A Practitioner's Guide to Three Values for One Company, and the Arithmetic of the Gap
The four workbooks behind Business Valuation: the three methods on one set of inputs, the discounted cash flow line by line, the control premium converted into the synergies it demands, and the reverse solve for the growth a price assumes.
Worked example: Why do a DCF and a transaction multiple disagree by 26.8 per cent?
Value It, Finance It with an SBA Loan and Seller Notes, and Close Without Overpaying
The two workbooks behind Buying a Small Business: the add-back bridge, sources and uses with the SBA valuation cap and guaranty fee solved in closed form, ten years of cash coverage, and a deal priced for the day its largest customer leaves.
Worked example: What is a seller-financed purchase price actually worth in cash?
What It Costs to Raise Money, and Who Decides the Number
The four workbooks behind Capital Markets: the interpolation that decides a concession, the cost of a bond issue under each convention, the placement discount and the leak computed at a constant discount, and the register of every choice with its value in euros.
Worked example: How much of an accelerated placement's cost never appears on an invoice?
Five free Excel workbooks: two defensible equity bridges 20.70 million apart, a peg worth 7.00 million, and the six choices that remove half an earn-out.
Worked example: How much of an earn-out can the buyer's accounting adjustments remove?
A Practitioner's Guide to What a Hedge Costs, What It Saves, and What It Does to Your Cash
The four workbooks behind Derivatives: the covered-interest identity that closes to eight decimal places, the rolling programme against the locked one, the collar re-fixed year by year, and the collateral ledger where two date conventions give opposite answers.
Worked example: How much more margin does a five-year hedge call than a rolling one?
A Practitioner's Guide to the Quarter That Beat Its Budget, Missed Its Plan, and Earned Less Money
The four workbooks behind Financial Planning and Analysis: the same quarter against five comparators, the price-volume-mix bridge and the margin split into mix and price, segment contribution with the corporate pool allocated two ways, and forecast bias measured against its own noise.
Worked example: When does a commission plan reward a discount that loses money?
A Practitioner's Guide to Measuring What Actually Breaks a Fund
The four workbooks behind Financial Risk Management: value at risk and the backtest, the stress book and its reverse, the liquidation engine with two selling policies, and the transfer to the investors who stay.
Worked example: How much of a credit fund's diversification benefit survives a crisis?
A Practitioner's Guide to Building, Validating and Defending a Credit Model That Decides
The four workbooks behind Machine Learning for Finance: the scorecard built from counts, discrimination against calibration, population stability and the applicants the model never saw, and the cut-off priced in two different years.
Worked example: What does leaving a credit score cut-off unchanged actually cost?
A Practitioner's Guide to the Seven Prices of One Deal, and Which of Them Is True
The four workbooks behind Mergers and Acquisitions: the seven prices of one deal and the three that are the same number, the combined accounts under all four accretion conventions, the value bridge against the board's version, and the margin ladder that admits no solution at all.
Worked example: Do uncapitalised leases count as debt in a leverage covenant?
A Practitioner's Guide to Pricing, Hedging, and Where the Money Actually Comes From
The four workbooks behind Quantitative Finance: the closed form and the lattice with convergence live, all five Greeks with a finite-difference check, what eight points of volatility are worth, and the delta hedge laid out step by step.
Worked example: Does hedging monthly instead of daily lose money?
A Practitioner's Guide to One Company, Five Cash Balances, and the Liquidity That Disappears the Day It Is Needed
The five workbooks behind Treasury Management, every printed figure a live formula with a check: the five readings of cash, the liquidity test and the drawstop, working capital and the discount, the swap and the currency hedge, banks and the one-page report. With a blank set, working documents, forty questions and three cases.
Worked example: Did my currency hedge fail if it lost money?
Worked example: Does an undrawn revolver count as liquidity?
The four workbooks behind Financial Modeling from First Principles: the complete Alder Ridge model (three statements, revolver, cash sweep, DCF, LBO, 14 checks in three scenarios), a blank build of 693 practice cells, an error lab with eight switchable defects, and a timed ninety-minute test with its answer key.
Worked example: Is exiting below the entry multiple a conservative assumption?
Coming soon on Amazon · Free companion files
The companion files of The Equity Research Analyst: the coverage model that reproduces every figure in the book, blank coverage templates, and a timed recruiting test with its answer key.
Coming soon on Amazon · Free companion files
Start with Asset Management by Julian R. Sterling. It is the most read title in this list, and like the others it is built on one fully specified worked case whose every printed figure is reproduced in a free Excel workbook.
Yes. Every title in this guide has a free companion page on julianrsterling.com with the workbooks, blank templates and checklists. They need no account and no email address.
Analysts, associates and managers who need to compute the numbers rather than describe them: each book follows one case from the first input to the decision, at practitioner level.
Real estate investing, finance and fund management · Private equity and private markets · Credit, private credit and distressed debt · Infrastructure, data centres and energy · Regulation, compliance and banking · Business operations: cost, contracts, pricing and supply chain · Personal finance and investing for beginners