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IESE Business School

Corporate Finance Essentials

IESE Business School via Coursera

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Overview

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This Corporate Finance Essentials course provides a foundational understanding of key financial concepts relevant to companies, investors, and capital markets. You'll learn to interpret financial news, master essential financial vocabulary, and understand core accounting principles. No prior knowledge required. By the end of this course, you will be able to analyze company financial statements, understand basic investment strategies, and apply financial principles to business decision-making. This knowledge will be invaluable for your career in finance or accounting. Limited free materials available.

Syllabus

  • Course Overview: Introduction to Finance
  • Finance: Understanding Risk and Return
    • Welcome to Session 1 In this session we will discuss some basic but essential financial concepts such as mean return, volatility, and beta. We will also learn how to apply them in order to assess the performance of selected equity markets over the last decade. The learning objective is to understand the basic, essential, and widely used financial concepts.
  • Finance: Correlation and Portfolio Diversification
    • To understand diversification, an issue at the very heart of most investment decisions, and the role that correlation plays in determining the gains from diversification.
  • Finance: CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) and the Cost of Capital
    • In this session we will discuss how companies assess their cost of debt, their cost of equity, and ultimately their cost of capital. We will also discuss why this last concept is at the heart of many of the most important corporate decisions.
  • Finance Application: Estimating the Cost of Capital
    • In this session we will put to work all the concepts discussed in the previous session by estimating the cost of capital of a company. As usual, when putting theory into practice, a few complications arise and we will discuss how to deal with them.
  • Project Management: Project Evaluation Techniques
    • In this session we will discuss how companies routinely decide whether or not to invest in projects. We will discuss the two tools most widely used for this purpose, NPV and IRR, and apply them to the evaluation of an investment opportunity.
  • Finance: Corporate Value Creation Strategies
    • In this session we will discuss EVA, a tool widely used to assess whether a company is creating or destroying value. We will also put this tool into practice by estimating the EVA of two companies.
  • Final Quiz: Finance Fundamentals

Taught by

Javier Estrada

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Reviews

4.4 rating, based on 5 Class Central reviews

4.8 rating at Coursera based on 2555 ratings

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  • Anonymous Coward
    103
    This class is an easy introduction to some of the elements of corporate finance. While not a definitive course for mastery, it serves as a good starting point before jumping into other MOOC's on the subject.
  • Marc Jan Vandewal
    1
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    Anderson Tan
    12
  • Dadad Dadadad
  • Paoloantonioli
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