Corporate Finance: A Beginner’s Guide

Learn how to use tools to make sound financial decisions

Understanding the basics of corporate finance is key in making the right financial decisions. Armed with this knowledge, you can identify investment opportunities, attract investors, and increase the value of your organisation.

On this five-week course, you’ll gain critical skills to leverage corporate finance tools and techniques to make sound financial decisions.

You’ll practise on real-world examples to gain practical skills in financial analysis, investment decisions, and more.

Gain core financial analysis skills

First, you’ll learn fundamental financial analysis skills to evaluate profitability, performance, and stability.

This will help you make data-driven decisions using key metrics like revenue growth, profit margins, and cash flow.

Learn how to estimate the cost of capital

Next, you’ll explore risk and return models to understand the risk-return tradeoff in corporate finance.

This knowledge will help you estimate the cost of capital as you delve into the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to learn how to optimise a portfolio’s returns.

Understand capital budgeting

Then, you’ll master capital budgeting to help you understand your organisation’s cash in flows and cash outflows.

With this knowledge, you’ll have the finance skills to make strategic decisions that will increase the value of your organisation.

Gain knowledge of capital structure

Finally, you’ll explore the different types of funding companies use to grow their business.

You’ll learn the difference between debt and equity and how they mix, as well as how different payout policies affect the value of a company.

This knowledge will help you make sound funding decisions.

This course is designed for anyone looking to better understand corporate finance.

It will be especially useful for graduate students, approaching a pre-experience MSc program, and aspiring entrepreneurs, looking to start their own business, who are in need of basic corporate finance knowledge.

It will also suit those planning to take an intermediate or advanced corporate finance course in the future since it lays the foundations of the discipline.

This course is designed for anyone looking to better understand corporate finance.

It will be especially useful for graduate students, approaching a pre-experience MSc program, and aspiring entrepreneurs, looking to start their own business, who are in need of basic corporate finance knowledge.

It will also suit those planning to take an intermediate or advanced corporate finance course in the future since it lays the foundations of the discipline.

• Apply key financial analysis tools and techniques (reformulations, ratios, …) to understand a firm overall performance over time and across comparables.
• Apply the concepts of time value of money, present value, future value, and other basic tools of corporate finance.
• Calculate net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), payback period, profitability index to evaluate projects.
• Interpret the basic trade-off between risk and return in corporate finance and estimate the cost of capital.
• Evaluate a firm’s capital structure, determine the optimal debt-equity position and dividend policy