Your previous coursework in accounting introduced you to financial reporting as the “language of business“. It made you familiar with the architecture of financial statements and their interpretation. The present course on “Financial Statement Analysis” builds on that knowledge and focuses on ist application in the real world. You will learn to analyze and interpret financial statements to assess a firm’s financial situation and establish a basis forecasting and equity valuation. The perspectives will be both external) equity investors and financial analysts as well as creditors (banks, rating agencies). To provide a bridge to the course ‘Financial Valuation‘, we will review the relationship between financial statement analysis, forecasting and valuation.

Learning Objectives and professional uses

Our aim in this course is to instruct you in conceptually sound and practical approaches to valuing equity securities, based on fundamental analysis. To this end, you will learn how to:

• Process financial statements to get an appropriate basis for analysis and valuation;
• Apply financial ratio analysis to bring out the story that the financial statements tell;
• Identify the drivers of firm value;
• Develop good financial statement forecasts using a systematic, structured approach;
• Apply the most common valuation models; and
• Use analysis and valuation to challenge the assumptions inherent in the market price.

The skills acquired in this course are useful in a wide array of professional areas, including investment banking (particularly equity research), private equity, security analysis, asset management, consulting, public accounting, corporate finance, and strategy. More generally, they allow you to increase your financial literacy to manage decisions that involve financial statements more effectively.

Lectures with a strong interactive element