IESE is continuing its initiative to capitalize on the benefits of technology in business education by launching another top-level Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Corporate Finance Essentials is designed for executives worldwide who wish to understand key financial issues related to companies, investors and the interaction between them in the capital markets.
The new program, to be delivered by IESE Prof. Javier Estrada, will develop participants’ financial literacy in order to better understand what is written in the financial press. Consisting of 45 to 60-minute lectures complemented by recommended readings, the six-session program requires no previous knowledge or preparation, and is designed to equip participants with the essential financial vocabulary of companies and finance professionals. As Prof. Estrada says, corporate finance is “the study of what companies do” and the program will provide a “first peek” at understanding what that entails, both on a theoretical and practical level.
Leveraging Prof. Estrada’s extensive research in the areas of portfolio management, investment strategies, and risk, the course will examine the essential concepts of corporate finance. Participants will examine mean returns, volatility, and beta – terms which are widely used in the financial press, and how they relate to assessing risk and return. Correlation and how it relates to diversification will be discussed, as will the reasons why diversification is central to portfolio construction.
Prof. Estrada will reveal how a company estimates the required return on its debt, its equity, and its cost of capital before participants apply these concepts to a specific company in an application. Another session will explore how a company evaluates projects and the tools it uses to make investment decisions. Finally, participants will see how a company assesses its creation (or destruction) of shareholder value and how tools that measure value creation relate to managerial compensation.
Prof. Estrada is the author of Finance in a Nutshell (FT Prentice Hall, 2005), The FT Guide to Understanding Finance (FT Prentice Hall, 2011), and The Essential Financial Toolkit - Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Finance But Were Afraid To Ask (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).