A Practical Guide To Corporate Finance Breaking The Financial Ice 1st Edition Christophe Thibierge by Christophe Thibierge, Andrew Beresford (auth.) 9781137492548, 9781349552658, 1137492546, 1349552658 instant download after payment.

This book offers an approachable guide to all key concepts within corporate finance.

The purpose of this book is to help you understand finance, progressively, using

imagery and a straightforward approach. To keep it interesting, the material in

each chapter is presented in a variety of ways: introduction of concepts, practical

illustrations and Socratic-style dialogues. First, we will take a look at the

structure of the book and then offer some words of advice before you read it. 

This book is laid out like a ten-course banquet

The appetizer

The ‘introduction to finance’ chapter is an appetizer in the literal sense of

the term: its purpose is to whet your appetite. It outlines what is covered

by finance and why it is worthwhile to study financial questions: to create

value and to better understand companies and their strategies.

The main courses – nine tasty chapters

Following the introduction, the book is structured in nine tasty chapters

for readers to savour. As at a well organized banquet, the dishes follow each

other in a sensible order – so the guests don’t get indigestion. Each chapter

contains ‘breathers’ – pauses in which to sit back and digest before moving

on. Readers can skip a chapter if they wish because the footnotes refer back

to key ideas and concepts. The chapters are organized as follows:

* Chapter 1. To borrow an analogy f * rom school, the first thing you have to

do is learn to read. Just as medical students begin with anatomy, anyone

who wants to understand finance must first learn to read and analyse the

past performance of companies. This chapter shows the link between

accounting documents and basic concepts in finance.

* Chapter 2. Once we’ve honed our skill at reading past performance, we

can begin to reason about the future. This chapter presents the tools used

to compare amounts of money received or paid out over time – even with

very distant payment dates.

* Chapter 3. Concepts learned in the first c * hapters are put into practice by

looking at investment projects and their forecasts. This chapter presents

the tools that help us make the best choice between several potential

investments, for example, investments varying in size, duration and risk.

* Chapter 4. One of the major issues raised in Chapter 3 is the measurement

of risk. We will need two chapters to cover this question. This chapter

uses a stock market approach to define different types of risk and their

love–hate relationship with returns within stock market portfolios.

* Chapter 5. Following the stock market approach, we return to a corporate

finance perspective for another view of risk measurement. This

chapter covers the risks and advantages of debt financing, and how

financial policy impacts a company’s cost of financing. This chapter

demonstrates the link between risk and expected return, and how to

estimate the required return for a given level of risk.

* Chapter 6. Building on previous concepts (forecasting cash f lows, discounting

over the long term, the notion of risk premium), Chapter 6

presents different models used to perform a company valuation, in a

step-by-step, practical approach.

* Chapter 6¾. This chapter is optional, mainly aimed at ardent finance

fans and the insatiably curious. It delves into the many practical and technical

questions that underlie business and investment project valuations.

* Chapter 7. Behind all these financial models and calculations, there are

financial markets, in other words, human beings. This chapter looks

at the stock market and the benefits of having a stock market, before

explaining all the fuss around the hotly debated idea of market efficiency.

In this chapter we will see that the human element can greatly perturb

many of the so-called rational models.

* Chapter 8. In this chapter, we come back to groundwork finance: cash

management. This includes cash budgets and forecasts, short-term risks

and how to hedge against them.

* Finally, Chapter 9 offers a conclusion to all these adventures in the land

of corporate finance.