Yenn-Ru Chen

Course Load:

HEAVY, as I wrote in description above.  This course has taken about 80% of my school time outside of class.

There are two text-books, one taught in class, and one students present on and that the mid-term exam questions are mostly based on (technically these books overlap with one being more advanced than the other).

You are in a group, choose an industry, and each work on a company within that industry, working through "Live Case" questions at the end of each chapter, putting to practice the theory you just learned.  This is then presented at mid-term, and at term-end, with a written report as well at term-end.

Course Content:

Basically: Corporate governance analysis; stockholder analysis; risk and return analysis; estimating earnings and cash flows; analyzing a firm's current financing choices; optimal financing mix; mechanics of moving to the optimal mix; the trade-off on dividend policy; a framework for analyzing dividends; valuation

Teaching Style:

It is mainly pure lecture, with comprehension questions from the professor sometimes.  She expects you to do the work and pay attention.  Powerpoint slides are available for download before each class on www.iteach.ncku.edu.tw.  This website is in Chinese, but easy to navigate if you know the few buttons to press - however your groupmates in the finance department would probably be willing to help you print the notes too.

Comment from me:

It is a tough class, but I learned a lot in it (the most I've learned in any class here at NCKU as of yet).  If you have a strong finance background it may not require much reading, but the live case questions will most likely still take up a good chunk of your time.  If you don't have a strong finance background (maybe just a corporate finance intro course or something) it will be harder, but is doable.

As one of the most time-consuming things is to find a lot of the information you need for the Live Case (which you present during mid-term and end-of-term, and write a paper for), you can follow a few easy steps to ensure that the semester a lot easier and manageable:

1. For a really "easy" semester, when you decide on the industry your group will choose companies in, choose your company in the United States.  This is solely because almost all the information given online on the textbook's website is for the states, and saves you hours and hours of searching for different information

2. Go online to http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ when you are working on the Live Case, to get spreadsheets and applicable information (we didn't find out about this gem until 3 quarters through the semester).  In the left-hand column click on "columns and support" and choose the 2nd book from the left ("applied corporate finance").  However, something to note, doing calculations on your own instead of using the spreadsheets gives you a better understanding of the material, of course.

3. Choose a company that has been around more than 5 years, as you are requested to do the analysis on 5 years of data (more years will give you more info for ie regressions etc)

4. Choose a company that isn't too spread all over the place in terms of what they do - a.k.a. too diversified (whether in the US or not)

Also, as the workload is very heavy for this class, i would recommend setting up weekly meetings from the beginning and sticking to them. It is nearly impossible to complete all of the calculations and writing involved with the indepth corporate analysis that is necessary. For the midterm alone I spend probably a 50 hour week on this project alone because I didnt do anything until the last minute. I would not recommend this method.

Other than that, this is a class that just by your participation you will learn a lot. If you work hard it can be one of the most beneficial classes offered here. Also, the professor works as hard as you do so you know your effort will be seen and graded accordingly. Good Luck!