[MUSIC] My name is Heitor Almeida, I'm a professor of corporate finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I've been teaching corporate finance to MBAs, PhDs and undergraduate students since 2001 and I also spend a lot of time researching corporate finance topics that we will discuss in this course, such as liquidity management, corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions. I am originally from Brazil, so this explains the song I always play in the beginning. It also explains my accent. I came to the US in 95 to work on my PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, I managed to graduate in 5 years. So, I've graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000. My first job was at New York University. I've spent seven years teaching and doing research at NYU before I've moved to Champaign-Urbana in 2007. Why did I get into corporate finance? As with many paths in life, it was a little bit by accident and I want to share the story with you. This was about January of 1998 and at that point, I had finished all my course work, I had finished my exams in the PhD. And I was thinking about what am I going to do for my research? What is my dissertation going to be about? Remember, I was an economics PhD, so I wasn't really studying finance at that point. Finance is one of the topics we study in economics, but there are many other topics. Macroeconomics, labor economics and I was really trying to think what I was going to do. Corporate finance was not even crossing my mind at that point. What happened is that I decided to take a course, a course that really changed the course of my life. It was a corporate finance course that was taught at the Chicago Business School by a professor named Raghuram Rajan. If you are from India, you probably heard his name. He's currently the Central Bank governor of the Indian government, so I'm sure you've heard his name or other people might have heard about him as well. He was the chief economist of the IMF some years ago. But in any case, that course was great. I really enjoyed learning about corporate finance and it got me thinking about how companies make financial decisions? How companies make investment decisions? I became fascinated with this topics. And in particular, I became really interested in understanding why corporate finance matters for the economy as a whole? What is the link between corporate finance and macroeconomics and issues like that? After that course, I never really looked back. I started research corporate finance, I got my first job. I started teaching corporate finance and I've been doing that ever since. The morale of this story is that a single course can change your life. So this is my office. This is where I do my research and where I prepare my classes. It's the typical office of a professor. It's not very special, not particularly organized. The real reason I brought you here is because the office of a professor is like a visual resume, you can look up my resume on the web. But it's nice to actually be here, so I can show you some things. So here's where I have the prizes that I won for my research and for my teaching. For example, I have this prize that I won in 2008 for the best paper published in The Journal of Finance. That year, The Journal of Finance is considered to be the best journal in our profession. So, I'm very proud of that one. I have the medal that I won when I became a chair professor at University of Illinois. You can see that it's a very heavy medal, so people don't go around wearing that medal, we just keep it here in our office for people to see. And I have this really cool prize that I liked, it's a basketball, as you can see that I actually won a year ago from my executive MBA students when I was elected professor of the year. And as you can see here, it's signed. All the students signed the ball. In that program, we have about 40 students, so it fits in a regular basketball. And as we are starting this, I was thinking about if we're doing an online class, there are maybe thousands of students. I was thinking how big the ball should be, if all the students would have to sign in, that would probably end up being bigger than this office. In this course, we will learn how companies make financing and investment decisions that create value for shareholders, okay. Some of the issues that we will study are how to use accounting statements to how to measure the financial health of a company. We're going to learn that accounting is the language of finance and we're going to learn that language, then we're going to learn how to manage a companies short and long term need for liquidity. We're going to cover models that allow us to forecast and manage a company's liquidity needs, then we're going to learn tools that are going to allow us to measure the contribution of a new project or a new acquisition to shareholder value. We're going to learn the very important concept of net present value, which is the tool that is going to allow us to do that. After we do that, we're going to learn how to incorporate risk and uncertainty into investment valuation decisions. And finally, we will learn how to measure the performance of existing investments or divisions of a company. We are going to learn tools that are going to allow us to measure whether a division or whether an investment is generating value for a company or not. This course is divided in four modules. Each module has certain topics. So in module one, we're gonna talk about goal of the company; financial ratios, then we're going to do financial planning in module two. We're going to talk about investments in module three. Module four is about mergers and acquisitions, risk and performance evaluation. So here, you know all the topics we're going to cover in each module. A very important point that I want to discuss is that each module has three sets of problems and they are a little bit different from each other. The practice quizzes are simple, direct questions that allow you to practice the concepts that we learn as we learn them. So as you see, the practice quizzes are going to be introduced within the module and are going to cover certain topics that we just learned. All the practice quizzes are going to come with solutions and immediate feedback. So as you do a question, you get immediate feedback whether it's right or wrong and you get the solution as well. So you can understand why your answer was right or wrong. Then at the end of module, there is a quiz. The difference is that for this quiz, you will get feedback on whether your answer is right or wrong, but there will be no explanation. There will be no solution to the end of module quiz. If you want to understand why your answer is right or wrong, what you should do is go back and look at the practice quizzes. The end of module quizzes are going to be very similar to the practice quizzes. And then at the end of the module, there's going to be an assignment. The difference between the quizzes and the assignment is that the quizzes are simpler, more direct questions whereas the assignments are going to be more complex, deeper questions that are going to allow us to dig deeper in the concepts that we learn in the course. So for example, the assignments are going to have some mini cases that I wrote where you're going to have to analyze real world companies and look at the data analysis of some of the topics we discussed during this course. Make sure you work on all of them. It's important to do all of these assignments. After all, practice makes perfect. Both with guitar playing and with corporate finance.
