How to ace your business finance class : essential knowledge and techniques to master the material and ace your exams

[Note: eBook version of latest edition now available; see Amazon author page for details.] This pocket-sized book is aimed at students in their first finance class at the undergraduate, MBA, or executive education level. The class is usually called "Business Finance" or "Financial Management." (A list of topics covered appears below.) The author's goals are to help you master the material and to lift your grades. He approaches these goals from two different angles. First, he uses 25 years of experience teaching this material to explain carefully the stumbling blocks that have consistently tripped up students year after year. Addressing these common sources of confusion gives every student every opportunity to master the material. Second, he presents safe strategies he has developed to help you solve numerical problems in finance. Although these strategies take only an extra minute to implement, they frame each numerical problem so as to increase the likelihood that you detect and fix any errors, while reducing the likelihood that you make any errors in the first place. These techniques also increase the likelihood that you earn partial credit. Note that because the author focuses on stumbling blocks, he necessarily skips over some simpler material that does not usually cause problems. As such, he does not cover the fine detail of every topic in the class. Similarly, he gives only enough worked examples to explain concepts and techniques. Different students have different needs. For example, you might have no real interest in finance, but you need to pass the class to get your degree. Alternatively, you might be a gung-ho finance major who wants to ace the class, or an MBA or exec-ed student who does not care about grades and just wants to master the material. Prof. Crack has been meeting different needs in the classroom for 25 years, and his presentation is pitched simultaneously at these different clienteles. Although this book is aimed primarily at students, the fact that Prof. Crack focuses on essential knowledge and techniques also makes this book useful to instructors. For example, an instructor who is new to the class can use this book to quickly improve his or her understanding and teaching of the trickiest parts. The chapters of the book are as follows: Foundations, Financial Statements, TVMI (One Cash Flow), TVM II (Multiple Cash Flows), Inflation and Indices, Bonds and Interest Rates, Equities and Dividend Discount Models, Capital Budgeting I (Decision Rules), Capital Budgeting II (Cash Flows), Capital Budgeting III (Cost of Capital), Capital Budgeting IV (A Paradox), The CAPM and Interest Rates, Risk and Return, Market Efficiency, Capital Structure, and Dividends.