Finance Mastery: Corporate & Investment Finance

This session provides an overview of the whole course, using a visual "mind map" we've developed over ten years - ALL of finance on one sheet of paper! Make sure you watch it - it makes the rest of the course a LOT easier to follow and understand. And we refer to this mind map throughout the course.

When Financiers talk about RISK, they don't mean some vague fuzzy feeling in their tummy - instead they take a carefully structured analysis of all the elements of risk, their probability, their potential impact, and so their priority, and then they can give risk a "value" and begin to think about how to manage the most critical risks. And Time plays a central role in how risks play out. 

At the HEART of ALL of finance is the relationship between RISK and RETURN. It is the APEX concept in Finance and MUST be properly explored in order to understand ALL other areas of Finance.

All sources of Finance are either Debt or Equity or some hybrid of the two or some derivation of the two. It is CRITICAL to REALLY understand the essence of just these two ideas.

There are five ratios - Cost of Capital (CoC), Discount Rate (DR), Return On Capital Employed (ROCE), Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) - and each says something subtle about risk, return and time in any financial scenario. Understanding these ratios is a MAJOR step towards mastery in finance.

We use real-life examples to understand the motivation behind the three main published accounting statements, and to see how they all follow a standard format. Once you understand the motivation and format for each, suddenly accounts open up to you.

This special session focuses on a handful of very common accounting concepts that you really need to have a handle on to be credible. These include depreciation, amortization, revenue recognition, accruals, and the matching principle.

We analyse accounts from M&S, GM, and Exxon Mobile. This is ALL about gaining familiarity with how accounts work the world over, and gaining the confidence to look at accounts, to ask smart questions about them, and understand what they're saying to you.

In this session, we "visualise" the life of money in a business, and we see how that story is told in the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Statement. So it naturally starts with funding a business, then producing a product or service and selling it, which entails a working capital cycle. Everything becomes apparent through this dynamic graphical explanation!

We take a deep dive into the common - and VERY useful - ratios, and think about what REALLY makes ratios work. These are the everyday ratios talked about in millions of conversations a day around the world. Once you're familiar with them, they're really easy!

We start at the very basics...get our grasp of the key concepts ROCK solid...with the essential tips on the SMART way to approach modelling...then slowly build. In the next session on modelling we get much more sophisticated. The Excel used in this lecture as available for download.

In this session, we build on more sophisticated modelling components leading to a dashboard and statutory accounts as outputs. The Excel used in this lecture as available for download too!

We take a hard look at Venture Capital, how it really works, how VCs think, and at the essential arithmetic that sits at the heart of it.

Valuation is about making informed guesses about the future, using a set of tried and tested tools. In this session we run through the main techniques, think about approaches to using them, and look at some of the tricks of the valuation trade.

We survey the main types of markets for capital, understand what makes them tick, look at their significance in the world economy and explore the various classes of securities and derivatives that are issued and traded on  those markets.

In some ways, Private Equity represents the high watermark of Finance. By understanding Private Equity, we get to see ALL the principles this course has looked at being played out in real-life. Not only is it fascinating in its own right, but it's a GREAT way to end the course, consolidating everything we have learnt.  So in this session we look at what PE is, what's its place in the world of Finance really is, what it's for, how it works and we end by looking at a case study of the very successful Private Equity buy-out and turn around of Ducatti Motorcyles.