The market-leading undergraduate investments textbook, Essentials of Investments by Bodie, Kane, and Marcus, continues to evolve along with the changes in the financial markets yet remains organized around one basic theme―that security markets are nearly efficient, meaning that you should expect to find few obvious bargains in these markets. This text places great emphasis on asset allocation while presenting the practical applications of investment theory. The text also focuses on investment analysis, which allows us to present the practical applications of investment theory and convey practical value insights. A collection of Excel spreadsheets is provided to give you the tools to explore concepts more deeply. In their efforts to link theory to practice, the author team also makes their approach consistent with that of the CFA Institute. Included are questions from previous CFA exams in our end-of-chapter problems and CFA-style questions derived from the Kaplan-Schweser CFA preparation courses. Zvi Bodie is Professor Emeritus at Boston University. He holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management. He has published widely in scholarly and professional journals on pension investment strategy and life-cycle asset-liability matching. In 2007 the Retirement Income Industry Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award for applied research. Alan Marcus is the Mario J. Gabelli Professor of Finance in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his PhD in economics from MIT. Professor Marcus has been a visiting professor at the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration and at MIT's Sloan School of Management and has served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Marcus has published widely in the fields of capital markets and portfolio management. He also spent two years at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), where he developed models of mortgage pricing and credit risk. He currently serves on the Research Foundation Advisory Board of the CFA Institute. Alex Kune holds a PhD from the Stern School of Business of New York University and has been Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo; Graduate School of Business, Harvard; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. An author of many articles in finance and management journals. Professor Kane’s research is mainly in corporate finance, portfolio management. and capital markets.