This course provides a brief introduction to the fundamentals of finance, emphasizing their application to a wide variety of real-world situations spanning personal finance, corporate decision-making, and financial intermediation. Key concepts and applications include: time value of money, risk-return tradeoff, cost of capital, interest rates, retirement savings, mortgage financing, auto leasing, capital budgeting, asset valuation, discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, net present value, internal rate of return, hurdle rate, payback period.

What is risk? Why do firms manage risk? In this course, you will be introduced to the different types of business and financial risks, their sources, and best practice methods for measuring risk. This course will help you gauge different risk types and set risk limits, describe the key factors that drive each type of risk, and identify the steps needed to choose probability distributions to estimate risk. You will explore the history and development of risk management as a science, and financial and business trends that have shaped the practice of risk management. By the end of the course, you will have the essential knowledge to measure, assess, and manage risk in your organization. To be successful in this course, you should have a basic knowledge of statistics and probability and familiarity with financial instruments (stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, etc). Experience with MS Excel recommended.

Put your investment and portfolio management knowledge to the test through five weeks of hands-on investment experiences: • Developing and managing your own simulated investment portfolio, resulting in a peer-graded report covering portfolio strategy, analysis, and performance • Advising case study clients on a variety of investment topics, essentially acting as an investment advisor in a simulated environment recommending strategies for and changes in portfolios based on challenges and issues faced by your clients • Using the sophisticated web-based analytical tools of Silicon Cloud Technologies LLC’s Portfolio Visualizer including portfolio mean variance optimization, historical and forecasted efficient frontiers, Fama-French factor models, and many more Your capstone experiences are directly applicable to managing real world investment portfolios and the final report can be shared with family, friends, and potential or current employers. By the end of the capstone project, you will have incorporated concepts from all four courses, including: • Analyzing multiple asset classes • Asset allocation and risk management • Current market trends • Behavioral finance • Investment styles and strategies • Financial market innovation • Investment performance evaluation

In this course you will learn how companies decide on how much debt to take, and whether to raise capital from markets or from banks. You will also learn how to measure and manage credit risk and how to deal with financial distress. You will discuss the mechanics of dividends and share repurchases, and how to choose the best way to return cash to investors. You will also learn how to use derivatives and liquidity management to offset specific sources of financial risk, including currency risks. Finally, You will learn how companies finance merger and acquisition decisions, including leveraged buyouts, and how to incorporate large changes in leverage in standard valuation models. Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand how companies make financing, payout and risk management decisions that create value • Measure the effects of leverage on profitability, risk, and valuation • Manage credit risk and financial distress using appropriate financial tools • Understand the links between payout policies and company performance • Use derivatives and liquidity management to offset financial risks • Pick an appropriate financing package for an M&A or leveraged buyout deal This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

By the end of this project, you will be able to complete a financial statement with Microsoft Excel, composed of a transactions page, profit and loss statement, and balance sheet. You will learn how to enter your business transactions and interpret the data presented in the profit and loss statement. You will also learn about the components of a balance sheet and will have a better understanding of how a financial statement can be used to help track and present financial information for your company.

This course teaches how to value and price M&A deals and to choose the optimal financing mix for an M&A deal. The course focuses on all the major types of M&A deals including strategic M&A, private equity leveraged buyouts (LBOs), and restructuring deals such as spinoffs and asset transfers.

This course will provide back test results for all the strategies in developed and emerging markets. The learner will also be taught scientific ways of back testing without succumbing to either look ahead (or) survival bias. You will learn various methods of building a robust back testing system for the strategies discussed in the previous course. You will be taught how to differentiate between mere data mining and results based on solid empirical or theoretical foundation. Next, you will learn the ways and means of back testing the results and subjecting the back test results to stress tests. After which, you will learn the various ways in which transaction costs and other frictions could be incorporated in the back testing algorithm. Finally, you will learn techniques for measuring a strategies' performance and the concept of risk adjusted return. You will use some of the famous measures for risk adjusted returns such as Sharpe ratio, Treynor's Ratio and Jenson's Alpha. You will see how to pick an appropriate benchmark for a proposed fund.

In this course, you will discover models and approaches that are designed to deal with challenges raised by the empirical econometric modelling and particular types of data. You will: – Explore the motivations of each approach by means of graphs, preliminary statistics and presentation of economic theories – Discuss the problem of identification of the parameters, and how to address this problem by modelling simultaneous equations and causality in economics. – Examine the key features of panel data, and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of working with panel data rather than other structures of data. – Learn how to choose what econometric specification to adopt by introducing the test for poolability and the Hausman tests. – Discuss models for probability that are used where the variable under investigation is qualitative, and needs to be treated with a different approach. – Learn how to apply this approach to building an Early Warning system to forecast systemic banking crises using data from the World Bank. It is recommended that you have completed and understood the previous two courses in this Specialisation: The Classical Linear Regression Model and Hypothesis Testing in Econometrics. By the end of this course, you will be able to: – Respond appropriately to issues raised by some feature of the data – Resolve address problems raised by identification and causality – Resolve problems raised by simultaneous equation and instrumental variables models – Resolve problems raised by longitudinal data – Resolve problems raised by probability models – Manipulate and plot the different types of data.

This project will give you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the cloud-based platform, ProfitBooks. We will start this project by introducing you to the platform through creating an online account and taking a virtual tour of the software. This step will include updating your company profile in the settings. We will continue our introduction by building out a CRM through the customer profile feature. Once the customer profiles are created, you will be introduced to some beginner features on the platform. This project will focus on the Item feature for products and services & invoice feature for billing. Upon completion of this project, you will understand how to add customers to your CRM, inventory items and services, and invoice customers. You will have the confidence to continue towards intermediate use of ProfitBooks in a continuation series. ProfitBooks is an online accounting and payroll management software for small businesses. It allows users to organize offices finances and track all activities related to their business. This free online tool allows you to manage your money without accounting knowledge, grow sales with powerful invoicing tools, track inventory with ease, and run your business with total confidence. ProfitBooks hosts your information on the secure and widely-trusted Amazon Web Services (AWS) while implementing additional security features like secure-access, built-in firewalls, encrypted data storage and periodic back-ups. You can read more about their security policy here: https://www.profitbooks.net/cloud-data-security/.

This course provides an intensive conceptual and applied introduction to auditing in society. It focuses on concepts and applications related to financial-statement auditors’ professional responsibilities as well as major facets of the audit process including risk assessment and audit reporting. In the U.S. financial-statement audits and related services generally are provided by Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). To succeed in this course, you should anticipate engaging in critical thinking and thoughtful communication about audit professionals' decision environments, decision processes, and deliverables. Additionally, you should understand the macro-level learning objectives in each of the course's weekly modules.