A better title for this book would be "Elementary Statistics for Junior Analysts." It walks readers through data visualization, basic probability, hypothesis testing, regression, analysis of variance, linear programming, Monte Carlo simulation, time series analysis, etc. There is actually very little about banking or finance. There are a few cursory chapters on financial topics like value-at-risk, discounting and project evaluation. But the meat of the book is statistics; finance is garnishing. Of course, throughout the book, examples are contrived to seem financial. This entails little more than sprinkling them with words like "compliance," "trade," or "account." I found no examples that relate in any way to what actually goes on in finance.

The treatment of the statistics is cookbookish. Readers are shown how to do specific computations rather than told the underlying theory. This can be confusing at times. For example, the discussion of probability distributions starts with discrete distributions. Rather than try to explain the transition to continuous distributions, the authors simply start talking about uniform and normal distributions. It is as if ten pages were ripped from the book containing that transitional information!