Objectifs

This unit is designed to prepare you to analyze, interpret, and evaluate financial statements. This course will also develop your critical thinking, problem-solving and presentation skills to assess and understand real-world situations that arises in the field of finance (such as ethical/unethical decision-making, understand M&A transaction dynamics, valuing companies and securities, etc.)

The skills earned in this class will help your future careers as independent investors, fund/asset managers, bank employees, and all functions requiring the analysis of private and public companies.

This course is beneficial for experienced financial statement users such as CPA/CFAs, as well as users with no accounting and finance background (beyond introductory college classes).

Contenus

The course is based on weekly case studies (from Harvard Business School): after an introduction on theory of how financial statements are composed, you will learn how to understand and evaluate them through real-life case studies.

The case and their analysis will deepen your knowledge of financial ratios, forecasting and valuation process based on financial statements. Furthermore, you will learn how a firm's business plan and strategy will translate into the financial statement. This unit emphasizes developing your mind to think critically and make judgments based on your technical analysis.

Finally, this class will be beneficial for developing your teamwork skills. Each case shall be prepared in group before the start of the class: you will be assigned to a random group before each class and will be given the case study to read along with questions to solve, which will need to be uploaded as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation before the start of the next class.
We will randomly select a group each week to present their findings to the class. After each presentation, there will be a discussion session (thoughts on the case by the professor, Q&A, etc.) to allow students to share their views and argument.

Grading:
Semester project with weekly deliverables (weekly case assignments submissions in MS PowerPoint format) will count for 70% of your final grade.
The group presentation will count for 20% of your final grade.
Individual class participation will count for the remaining 10%.

Class attendance is mandatory.

Références

The course will be primarily based on materials from Harvard Business School. These Harvard case studies are not free (around 5$ per case, 60$ in total) and will need to be bought before the start of the second week of class (the details will be provided by the professor at the start of the semester).

Purchasing the cases is mandatory.

Evaluation

1ère tentative

Examen:

Sans examen (cf. modalités)  

Evaluation:

Grading is based on your semester project consisting of weekly delivrables (70%), your group presentation (20%) and your individual participation throughout the semester (10%).

Rattrapage

Examen:

Ecrit 2 heures

Documentation:

Autorisée

Calculatrice:

Autorisée

Evaluation:

There will be a written exam of 2 hours similiar to the submitted cases seen during the semester.