Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

The purpose of this course is to learn about fundamental drivers of value and risk by analyzing financial statements of businesses in different industries. Every public company provides a lot of financial and operational information in its filings. How can this information be used to evaluate its prospects and its risks?
The course is organized around two themes (1) how to identify relevant information in the financial information reported by firms, and (2) how to draw inferences using sound analytical methodology. To this end, we will review techniques for valuation and risk analysis used by banks and asset management firms. The valuation models you will study in this course are all fundamental models – models that use
financial information and review the fundamental operating characteristics of the company. We will learn to build simple financial models, perform risk analysis and fine tune value drivers. Much of the data comes from the financial statements – but it requires a careful study of arcane footnotes to unearth the information provided by the companies. This is an advanced course that goes into the details of footnote analysis, accounting rules, and financial presentations. This course builds on what you learned in Financial Accounting and Corporate Finance. These courses are pre-requisites for taking this course. It is assumed that you have already taken these courses. If you have not taken these courses you should first talk with me before you register. This course will build significantly on your knowledge from those courses. If your basics are solid and you are interested in learning to read financial statements; if you wish to learn to apply financial analysis; this course is for you. We will use excel to build some of the models – but this is not a course in excel. But, it is highly recommended that
you have a good working knowledge of how to build formulas in excel before you come to this class.
By the end of the course, you should be able to perform a thorough, credible investment or credit analysis that meets a high standard. Students should have the ability to estimate fundamental values, and pull apart the information in the financial statements to get relevant information. This course should be of interest to those contemplating careers in investment banking, security analysis, private
equity, hedge funds, and corporate finance.

Instructor: Radha Radhakrishna
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3 points

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ACCT B7009

Financial Statement Analysis a

W 6 p.m.-9:15 p.m.
Instructor: Valentin Dimitrov
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3 points

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ACCT B8009

Fundamental Analysis for Inves

Most of the decisions of analysts, consultants, entrepreneurs, investors and managers require us to look ahead and assess an uncertain future. In this class, you will learn a unique approach to decision making that will help you consider the fundamentals of enterprises and how to link these fundamentals to underlying measures, which in turn will help you make better investment or management decisions. Students who have taken this course often comment on how it has transformed their thinking and understanding of companies. It also serves as a useful “capstone” to the MBA program as we draw on what was taught in most core courses.
In developing this line of reasoning and performing the analysis, we consider how to think about a new business as well as a publicly traded company. Having considered the basic building blocks, we next examine how the business resources and activities are translated into financial statements (whether for an early stage or public company) and consider what we learn from financial statements. We consider the extensive information increasingly available from outside sources, including various websites as well as Bloomberg and CapIQ. We also consider how certain accounting measures and practices impact the measures of the key elements of the business.
Focusing on the future, we take a different approach to many topics/concepts that are covered in various ways in other financial statement analysis, earnings quality, and security analysis and valuation classes. Many students take this course as well as other seemingly similar courses, and we have never received any feedback that the coverage in this course is redundant, irrespective of the other courses taken by students.
We will focus on understanding how entities create or destroy value for various stakeholders and what it would take to change this, how to consider uncertainty more explicitly in plans, and whether this fundamental value is reflected in the price or not (for entities that it applies to).
We will also take some time each week to address any topics that are in the financial press that bear on the subjects and the approach.

M 6 p.m.-9:15 p.m.
W 9 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Shivaram Rajgopal
Wikipedia h-index: 50 Info
3 points

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ACCT B8010

Corporate Transactions and Fin

TR 9 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
TR 2:20 p.m.-5:35 p.m.
Instructor: Anne Heinrichs
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3 points

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ACCT B8019

Applied Fundamental Analysis with Altern

Applied Fund Analysis Alt

Finding the ground truth regarding the positioning, operations, and prospects of a company, country, resource pool, or investment opportunity is challenging. It is imperative to go beyond the numbers in financial statements with alternative data and information. In this course, we will learn to accept that no predefined formula exists to identify, quantify, and project a complex organization operating in a constantly evolving global environment.
We will highlight the importance of sufficiently framing questions for intelligence gathering and analysis. The act of questioning serves as the very foundation of any investigation, project, or research endeavor. It sharpens our focus, guides our inquiry, and lays the groundwork for meaningful and actionable answers. The power to shape our understanding of the world, businesses, consumers, and individual actors lies in the answers and data we gather and the quality and direction of the questions we pose.
The confidence to ask the right questions and break down the subject of the analysis and associated materials will be a vital component of the learning. The student will work with real datasets and benefit from direct advice, experience, and practical insights from portfolio managers, research analysts, consulting data analysts, and others to derive value from the world of information within their reach.
The combination of traditional and alternative data with the right real-world questions serves to forecast future outcomes. The overarching framework for applied learning will be:
• Collection: Framing the appropriate questions and sourcing information and data in context of the subject being evaluated.
• Evaluation: Understating the reliability of the data and validity of the information value as presented.
• Analysis: Applying methodologies and frameworks, including financial frameworks to transform the data for concise decisions.
• Reporting: Frameworks for pushing the data to subject models, including financial models, presenting the derived intelligence in a useable format.
• Distribution: Informing user, including oneself and integrating feedback on the outcomes.
This course guides the student in acquiring alternative data, extracting insight from it, using it for projections, contextual business model evaluation, and determining “unknown unknowns”. The learning journey is intended to be insightful, engaging, empowering, and supplement traditional data, such as financial statements for st

F 2:20 p.m.-5:35 p.m.
Instructor: Matthew M Dell Orfano
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1.5 points

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ACCT B8026

Sustainability Reporting

Broadly speaking, the goal of this class is to provide students with both the theoretical and practical knowledge to understand the current challenges in accounting for firms’ ESG goals. In this rapidly evolving field, the course will be structured in four modules:

- Module #1 reviews the need for sustainability accounting and provide an overview of the providers of ESG metrics and the limits of current
aggregated ESG data.
- Module #2 present various market-based mechanisms to create ESG standards
- Module #3 discusses regulatory initiatives to create ESG information for listed firms
- Module #4 departs from non-financial disclosure and discuss the limits of current accounting standards and introduce new developments to
incorporate ESG characteristics into traditional financial statements.

While ESG encompasses a vast body of topics, this class will draw examples and discuss about a diverse set of issues ESG, including carbon emissions, employees pay, employees labor-safety, and the role of consumers’ NGO, based on short examples or cases spanning different firms in different industries (e.g., wholesale, aviation) and different countries (e.g., USA, France, Japan).
This half-term course is composed of a mix of lectures, cases and online or in-person interventions by high profile industry guest speakers. The lectures are motivated by (1) rigorous recent academic studies drawing from the accounting literature, but also borrowing from adjacent fields including economics, finance, law and strategy and (2) practitioners notes and examples.

Who should take this course?

Students should take this course if they are interested in ESG in general and/or if they expect to use disclosure of non-financial information in their career. This is particularly relevant for students who want to pursue careers in finance (e.g., investment banking) where firms’ ESG footprint is becoming a scrutinized factor in M&A or investment decisions in general, as well as students going to careers in consulting where corporate decisions will more and more be benchmark against their ESG implications.

Please note that this course does not require students to have pre-existing knowledge about ESG.