Book Description

This pocket-sized book is aimed at students in their first finance class at the undergraduate, MBA, or executive education level. The class is usually called "Business Finance" or "Financial Management." My sole goal is to lift your grades. I approach this goal from two different angles. First, I use 25 years of experience teaching this material to explain carefully the stumbling blocks that have consistently tripped up students year after year. Addressing these common sources of confusion gives every student every opportunity to master the material. Second, I present safe strategies I have developed to help you solve numerical problems. Although these strategies take only an extra minute to implement, they frame each numerical problem so as to increase the likelihood that you detect and fix any errors, while reducing the likelihood that you make any errors in the first place. These techniques also increase the likelihood that you earn partial credit. Note that because I focus on stumbling blocks, I necessarily skip over some simpler material that does not usually cause problems. As such, I do not cover the fine details of every topic in the class. (A list of topics covered appears below.) Similarly, I give only enough worked examples to explain concepts and techniques. I recognize that different students have different needs. For example, you might have no real interest in finance, but you need to pass the class to get your degree. Alternatively, you might be a gung-ho finance major who wants to ace the class, or an MBA or exec-ed student who does not care about grades and just wants to master the material. I have been meeting different needs in the classroom for 25 years, and my presentation here is pitched simultaneously at these different clienteles. Although this book is aimed primarily at students, the fact that I focus on essential knowledge and techniques also makes this book useful to instructors. For example, an instructor who is new to the class can use this book to quickly improve his or her understanding and teaching of the trickiest parts. The chapters of the book are as follows: Foundations, Financial Statements, TVMI (One Cash Flow), TVM II (Multiple Cash Flows), Inflation and Indices, Bonds and Interest Rates, Equities and Dividend Discount Models, Capital Budgeting I (Decision Rules), Capital Budgeting II (Cash Flows), Capital Budgeting III (Cost of Capital), Capital Budgeting IV (A Paradox), The CAPM and Interest Rates, Risk and Return, Market Efficiency, Capital Structure, and Dividends.