Clearing, Settlement and Custody (Operations Management Series (Securities Institute).)

I have worked several years as an IT developer in the clearing and settlement area for a major firm in the securities industry. This book is not an encyclopedia nor a book written for specialists. Rather, it allows me to spend 5 minutes and learn enough on a subject so that I can have an intelligent conversation with a user. The book is an easy read for a non-expert and the layout is very comfortable. Several of my coworkers have been coming around and borrowing my book. So I guess they like it too. A more appropriate title for this book would have "An Introduction to Clearing, Settlement and Custody" or maybe "Clearing, Settlement and Custody for Dummies".

It's just a collection of terminologies. The structure of contents is not well organized,too.

This is one of the worst books I have ever attempted to read. It is a massive collection of vague generalities about clearing and settlement that, if studied carefully, will leave you with absolutely no understanding about how these functions work. These are important functions and this book needs to be removed from the public domain so that someone can write a useful book.

Buying this book is probably the worst purchase decision that I have ever made. This book is more like a small glossary of financial terms and entities. As far as diagrams and tables are concerned, there are none. Even the basics like confirms, trade matching, reconcilliation are not covered.

Unfortunately this book is very poorly written. Terms and concepts are not well explained or defined. It is more a loose collection of bullet points than an genuine explanation of the processes. When I was a newcomer to the industry, I found this book frustratingly difficult to extract useful information from.