Syllabus Case

form the This course is about the analysis of corporate financial information (including financial services corporations) in order to value equity and/or debt securities. Major topics include: analysis of cash flow; dilutive securities and earnings per share; analysis of accounting changes; basic strategies in identifying distortion and fraud; off- balance sheet lending and borrowing; capital structure issues; mortgage-backed securities; asset-based financing; analysis of inter-corporate investments, of business combinations, and of multinational operations. Additionally, the tax implications of various derivative securities are studied.

Course Policies:

• Blackboard: You are responsible for reviewing blackboard before and after each class since I will be posting announcements on a daily basis (I will have all grades on blackboard too, so you can check your status in the class as you go along).

• Course Format: The course focuses on the analysis of corporate financial statements and how to use the information from the financial statement analysis to value firm equity and debt. The goal of the course is to develop your financial reasoning, analytical and critical thinking skills. To accomplish the goal of the course, I will assign homework each week which consists of problems that you are expected to solve. You will be tested on your reasoning, analytical, and critical thinking skills through surprise quizzes and exams. I will not collect the homework, but the exam/quiz problems will be very similar to the homework problems, so I recommend completing all homework. There will be one closed-book in-class mid-term exam and one closed-book in-class comprehensive final exam. Exam questions will consist mostly of financial statement analysis problems, both