Think of finance as a subject that answers three basic questions

  1. How do you evaluate opportunities for investment – also known as the valuation question
  2. How do you chose between opportunities – also known as the investment or choice question
  3. How do you fund or finance your investment decisions and choices – also known as the funding question

At its heart the ability to work with finance requires an ability to translate tomorrow’s returns into today’s dollars. At a simplest level this requires you to calculate present values using a defined rate of return. At a more complex level we add in payouts that vary with events, probabilities for events and distribution of investment returns based on your class as an investor. As a seasoned finance professional you adjust payments for likelihood, structure payments for tax efficiency and do analysis that zeroes in to drivers of financial performance for a business – sometimes to identify and fix problems, sometimes to learn how to repeat and replicate outstanding results.

Ideally the best way to figure out what you like or dislike about the subject is to try a few case studies. A case study presents a real world business problem in an academic setting. The objective is to teach by narrating a situation and then asking you to think about the choices you would make under that situation.

The Road map posts at Learning Corporate Finance lay out the core courses, case studies and training posts in a certain order based on the most common reading preferences we have seen so far on our site over the last 10 months. What follows are the two very different Corporate Finance Road maps:





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