Online Financial Courses

This programme will train you how to build robust forecast models for companies. We recommend (and provide as part of this programme) our Excel skills module. You should have basic competency in Excel and accounting to get maximum benefit from this programme.

You will progressively build an integrated balance sheet, profit and loss, and cash flow forecasting model. We will also build a discounted cash flow valuation and sensitivities to make it useful as a credit analysis, debt structuring and capital structure optimisation tool. The model is of Unilever and gives an interesting insight into the drivers behind the Kraft-Heinz bid and how the market valuation has closely tracked the DCF valuation implied from Management’s guidance to equity researchers.

The key to our technique of integrated model building is “Building in Balance”: using the basic principles of double entry book-keeping and carefully choosing the order in which we build and integrate we ensure that our forecasts balance from the beginning and stay in balance as we go. “Building in Balance” also gives us some simple troubleshooting tools to “shake-out” errors as soon as they arise, leading to a robust, error-free model straight out of the box.

The training will develop your Excel skills and show you how to reliably quickly and accurately build rigorous, flexible financial models. You’ll understand the flow and logic of typical forecasting models and you’ll be able to get more out of the peer/third party models you use.

The course is aimed at analysts with little accounting knowledge, or as a refresher of key concepts. It aims to teach delegates how to analyse and interpret company accounts, not how to be an accountant! Beginning with the primary accounting overview the course explains what the accounts ‘ headings’ mean in commercial and practical terms and how the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow are linked together in the “accounting flow”.

Downloadable exercises, with full video de-briefs, will allow delegates to understand how the operations of the business and the cash cycle in a business drive the “shape” of the accounts and the company’s ability to generate cash (or not!).

Delegates will learn how to calculate and interpret key operating and performance metrics used in valuation and credit assessment. The course will also show delegates the most common accounting adjustments made to these metrics to make them comparable across companies with interesting corporate structures, for example involving pension deficits and leasing for example. This course is equally relevant to people in management and accounting in a corporate context and analysts, investors and managers in banks and financial institutions.

Mark Woolhouse introduces you to some core Excel Skills. These are essential if you want to be able to produce your own models in an efficient way. Excel is very intuitive and easy to use – if you can do arithmetic you can write simple formulae in Excel. Many users however never get shown how to go beyond using Excel as a basic calculator and only “survive” in Excel rather than thrive. The techniques we demonstrate will help inexperienced users solve more complex modelling problems in Excel. We’ll show you how to plan and set up your workbook for ease of use; how to use shortcuts to speed you up; how to use $s and names to allow you to “bulk-code”, i.e. write one formula to use across a whole row, column or range; and how to solve logical problems in Excel. We hope to make you fast, efficient, and reliable as you work in Excel and so give you an “easy life” when using Excel.

The time value of money is the most fundamental concept in finance. It is the cornerstone of understanding asset valuation at all levels – from Fixed Income and Equities to Derivatives and Real Estate. It also provides the basis for understanding investment performance. It is far too easy to rely on models and calculators to do all the work for us, so in this digital learning course we explain the concept from first principal – why is there a time value of money? – as well as going on to look at some simple Excel calculations and functions. There are simple excel models to accompany the course.

In financial markets and products, there are plenty of standard measures of ‘averages’ and ‘risk’ that are thrown around without any specific definition. It is assumed that those in the financial world are comfortable with what is being talked about. Are you? When we talk of volatility, what is it exactly? When investment funds return annualised ‘average’ returns, how is that calculated? This module covers the key measures, how they are determined and how they can be applied.

This programme will teach you step-by-step how to build a leveraged buyout model. This is exactly the kind of model you might use as an investment banking analyst to “trawl” for deal opportunities and prepare a pitchbook. The crucial word here is Leveraged and a key element of the programme is to introduce you to the typical debt instruments used, the different roles they play in leveraged financing schemes and how the market has changed. The bottom line here is that the leveraged financing market in Europe grows more and more like the US market in terms of the depth of liquidity available, the range of investors, and the aggressiveness of financing terms. We’ll give you some background into the development of the market and how the arrival of new investors, such as Hedge Funds and CLOs pre-crunch, and more recently insurance companies and other institutions to the B loan market, have changed the funding landscape.

The model we’ll build is highly flexible, so it will allow you to model “old-school” A,B loan and mezzanine structures, unitranche financings and mixed loan and high yield bond schemes.

The model will produce all of the main return metrics that P/E investors use and the standard credit risk metrics that potential debt investors will use. We will also produce a value bridge – disaggregating returns into their various drivers: sales growth, operating margin expansion, debt paydown, “multiple arbitrage” and fees.

Simple models like this one are excellent tools to give you insight into what drives the economics (or lack of!) in a deal. This is precisely the sort of model you might build as part of your investment banking induction programme (or indeed you might discover it’s the “standard model” in your department – albeit with a few formatting changes). We hope you enjoy the programme.