Introduction and Course Overview

Lucas S. Macoris

Welcome to the Course

1. Overview and Course Organization
2. Grading and Evaluations
3. Navigating through the syllabus
4. How you can get the best of this course
5. Overall Q&A

Overview

• Financial agents are constantly making strategic decisions trying to balance the trade-off between risk and return:

  1. How many assets should I hold on my portfolio?
  2. How much holdings from risky assets should I hold in my portfolio?
  3. How can I fund profitable investment opportunities from my company?

• In this course, we’ll look at two sets of strategic decisions that financial agents (e.g, CFOs, Portfolio Managers) make:

  1. The first part will be focused at looking from a portfolio manager view: if you have the money and need to allocate it across a set of potential assets, how should you do it?

  2. The second part (after the mid-term) will be more focused on corporate finance decisions: if you have a good investment opportunity, how can you fund it, and What are the implications for the value of your company?

Course organization

• Basic text-book

  1. We will extensively follow Corporate Finance (Berk and DeMarzo 2023), as our text-book
  2. Throughout the syllabus, it will be referred as [BDM]

• Supplementary text-book

  1. Principles of Corporate Finance (Brealey, Myers, and Allen 2020)
  2. Investments (Bodie, Kane, and Marcus 2021)
  3. Financial Management: Theory and Practice (Brigham and Ehrhardt 2023)
  4. Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms(Downes and Goodman 2014)

• Supplementary Reading

  1. Other optional contents will be referenced throughout the the course

Grading and Evaluations

Grading will be composed of the following activities:

1. Mid-term Examination (40%)
2. Final Examination (40%)
3. 2x Quizzes throughout the semester (10%)
4. Practical work (10%)

• You can find the details of any of these activities in the official syllabus (available on eClass®)
• In case of any questions, feel free to reach out to lucas.macoris@fgv.br

Office-hours

I also host office-hours (by appointment) on Thursdays, 5PM-6PM. In these sessions, I’ll be more than happy to help you with anything you need from this course. Use the Office-hour Appointments link at the bottom of this slide to schedule some time (or click here).

Getting the best of this course

Getting the best of this course

How you can get the best of this course

1. Follow FGV-EAESP code of conduct
2. Be organized: pay attention to pre-readings and deliverables!
3. Be proactive: ask questions and participate in discussions
4. Take the lead on your learning: you are the ultimate responsible for your success!

How the professor can facilitate you getting the best of this course

1. All mandatory content will be provided in English, classes will be held in Portuguese
2. Provide a safe and open space for questions, both in-person and remote
3. Motivate students, both from the academic and practitioner standpoints
4. Provide opportunities to extend knowledge beyond the mandatory readings

Getting the best of this course, continued

Studying for examinations

1. I highly recommend using Prof. Henrique Martins (FGV-EAESP) materiais. In his website, there are suggested exercises for each lecture of our course.

\(\rightarrow\) To access, click here - I’ll also refer to the specific links for each part of the content at the beginning of each lecture

2. In the Syllabus, you can find a list of recommended exercises from our main text-book, (Berk and DeMarzo 2023). Note that these are not mandatory but rather serve as a way for your to practice

3. Use the handout as an opportunity to motivate your studies through real-world examples. These handouts will focus not only on providing you with a sense of how useful this is in a real-world application, but also can definitely help you better understand the mechanics behind everytine that we’ll study throughout the course!

References

Berk, J., and P. DeMarzo. 2023. Corporate Finance, Global Edition. Global Edition / English Textbooks. Pearson. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=m78oEAAAQBAJ.

Bodie, Zvi, Alex Kane, and Alan J Marcus. 2021. Investments.

Brealey, R. A., S. C. Myers, and F. Allen. 2020. Principles of Corporate Finance. The Irwin/McGraw-Hill Series in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. McGraw-Hill Education. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=nsrHuwEACAAJ.

Brigham, Eugene F, and Michael C Ehrhardt. 2023. Financial Management : Theory & Practice. 16th ed. Mason, OH: CENGAGE Learning Custom Publishing.

Downes, John, and Jordan Goodman. 2014. Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms. 9th ed. Barron’s Business Dictionaries. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series.