Objectives

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).

Contents

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 communication and decision-making skills. Each case shall be presented in class by the professor, along with specific questions related to each case. You will be given the case study along with its questions to read weekly to prepare for the class. On three random weeks of the semester, you will be evaluated with a quiz on the case the professor will have had just presented.

Grading:
• A final exam (50% of the grade).

• 3 unannounced quizzes on the case presented the given week (50% of the grade)

Class attendance is mandatory.

References

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

First attempt

Exam:

Written 2 hours

Documentation:

Allowed

Calculator:

Allowed

Evaluation:

There will be a final exam (50% of the grade) and 3 quizzes (50% of the grade) on your first attempt of the class.

Retake

Exam:

Written 2 hours

Documentation:

Allowed

Calculator:

Allowed

Evaluation:

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