Securities Operations: A Guide to Trade and Position Management

Very detailed book on entire trade cycle, also covers Corporate Actions, function of Custodian & Reconciliations. Simplicity of language and illustration used is very good.It explains the straight through processing as well as the all steps and intervention required at all channels of fails and rejects. The terminology used is very good some of them are not explained in other books e.g. security forms and security types.From BPO service prespective it covers the entire spectrum of services that can be offered. Simply magnificant book!!!

Michael Simmons' Securities Operations: A Guide to Trade and Position Management is IMHOP the best Financial Securities Operations text {Back, Front, Middle office; tilts more towards the Back}, for a new or even seasoned developer, app support, bus/sys analyst or investment banker. I work with traders, back & middle office and IT staff implemeting & supporting financial software at a top global investment bank, and though I have a fairly good financial background this book does a lot for me. It is very much what happens on the ground and reflects the others rich experience! For those developing, using, training or supporting financial s/w [Equities, Futures, FX, Options, Risk, Operations, etc.] it is easily the best.In 450 pages it clearly and succintly covers the full gamut of the operations cycle and instrument types with sufficient details of data strucures and workflows, to design and develop a reasonably complete productline of client prototypes and services kernel of investment banking software, even covering relatively obscure areas like primary market, lending & colllateral operations. You only need to flesh them out with product, algorithmic or customer-specific requirements. No other book on the market comes close; indeed it covers STP better than the dedicated STP books. Some reviewers - who may not have really read the book - say it is euro-centric, outdated, etc. and rate it poorly; I beg to differ! It is as error-free as any book can get and includes tables and diagrams that make it enjoyable reading. It does not adequately hit areas such as details of derivative products, pricing algorithms, etc. but it is simply impossible to cover such areas and still maintain focus on the fundamentals. In addition, it does not cover some of the latest developments, e.g continuous settlement [2nd edition is due, methink]; this should, however not detract from it's utility, accuracy or overall quality at all.Having said this, finer details of certain topics are better obtained from Larry Harris' Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners, which I consider the second best; he goes deeper than Simmons into exchange/market & brokerage structures, operations, behaviour and arbitrage. Other very good books that are must-read: Yogesh Shetty's Practical .NET for Financial Markets (Expert's Voice in .Net) - lots of good source code; Alexander Kuznetsov's The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals (McGraw-Hill Library of Investment and Finance) is quite recent with a basic introduction to derivatives, algorithmic trading and quantitatives with good references; Michael Simmon's other book Corporate Actions: A Guide to Securities Event Management (The Wiley Finance Series); Jeremiah J. O'Oconnell's Handbook of Global Securities Operatiions. Frankly, there are several others but IMHOP these are the best after reading and previewing several of them. If you must choose only two or three your best bet would be the first Simmons book, Larry Harris, and Shetty. [I do not know any of these authors; just saying it as I see it and giving a bit back for the helpful reviews I often read.]

One of the most authoritative books in the field even today. Very comprehensive in the middle and back office processes. Some of the steps in clearing and settlement is a bit dated, but still very relevant. Good book to keep as reference.

A very good book

the book is well written, definitely worth it.the only reason why I did not give 5 stars: the examples are too generic. only with generic names (for example, abc shares, global investment ltd, and so on) it's a little bit rough to follow the lines.anyway, worth it to get a deep dive in the securities operations, either if you are or not working in the insustry