Assignment 1: Whatâ??s It Worth?Due Week 4, Day 7 (160 points)IntroductionSo far in this Advanced Fi
Assignment 1: Whatâ??s It Worth?Due Week 4, Day 7 (160 points)IntroductionSo far in this Advanced Fi
Assignment 1: What’s It Worth?Due Week 4, Day 7 (160 points)IntroductionSo far in this Advanced Financial Management course, we’ve offered you an assortment of tools designed to enhance your ability to value a business. You’ve learned how to assess a business through the lens of several competitive advantage frameworks. You’ve learned numerous ways to quantify the value of a stock. And, you’ve become familiar with the thinking behind valuing a company’s fixed income. Now, as you might have suspected, it’s time to implement some of this new-found knowledge.Here’s the assignment. Pick a publicly traded company of your choosing. It should be one you’re familiar with, one that sells a product that you’ve used or seen, and one you would like to understand better. Then, we’re going to ask you to evaluate the company closely. You should go about doing this using any materials you can get your hands on, including:Financial StatementsInvestor PresentationsIndustry ReportsNewspaper/Magazine ArticlesConsumer ReviewsEtc.Once you’ve gotten a firm hold on the company, it’s financial standing and it’s competitive positioning, we want you to use the tools we introduced in the first four lectures to evaluate the company from a variety of different angles. The successful assignment will include all of the following:Write a 3-4 page paper in which you:Analyze the company’s competition advantages, including the Sellers framework.Analyze the company’s stock value. This will include analysis of a company’s present P/E, PEG, P/B, and P/S multiples versus competitors in the industry and versus historic multiples going over the past 1, 3, and 5 year periods. You are expected to offer an opinion as to the current priciness of the company’s stock. You are also welcome to perform a DCF analysis utilizing appropriate growth rates and discount rate, but this is not required.Assess the company’s fixed-income make-up. Please identify the bonds that the company has issued, the amounts of those bonds, their structure, their various due dates, and their various interest rates. You may also want to identify their market values versus par values, but it is not required.Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; references must follow JWMI style guide and writing format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:Evaluate the qualities of effective corporate governance.Use technology and information resources to research issues in advanced financial management.Write clearly and concisely about advanced financial management using proper writing mechanics.Assignment 2:The Face Deal-BookDue Week 6, Day 7 (165 points)The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:Evaluate the qualities of effective corporate governance.Use technology and information resources to research issues in advanced financial management.Write clearly and concisely about advanced financial management using proper writing mechanics.Introduction:The past two modules have been a bit of a mash-up of different ideas and tools, which makes it difficult to ask you to perform a neat, simple task that covers all the material that we covered. Instead, we’re going to ask you to synthesize the bigger concepts from each of the past 4 lectures. We’re going to do so using a company that most everyone is familiar with: Facebook.Facebook, as everyone pretty much knows now, rocketed to popularity starting in 2005 and hasn’t looked back since. As you might expect from a highly-successful, capital intensive, high-tech operation that’s growing at blazing speeds, the company went through several rounds of financing to finance the business’s growth. We’re going to ask you to look at that financing and explain to us what was going on.Though a savvy researcher could find these transactions herself via Google if she truly wanted to, we’ve gone ahead and pulled the big ones up for you in chronological order to save you some time. We encourage you to investigate each of these further, however. There’s no shortage of background on each of these. Here they are in nice news-bite capsules for digestion:The Facebook group announced that it has raised between $10 million to $12 million in first round financing led by Accel Partners on April 15, 2005. As a part of the transaction, Jim Beyers, a Managing Partner at Accel Partners, joined the company’s board. The post money valuation of the company was $100 million.Facebook, Inc. announced that it has raised $27.5 million in its third round of funding led by new investor Greylock Partners on April 19, 2006. New investor MeriTech Capital Partners and existing investor Accel Partners invested in the transaction. The post money valuation of the company was $525 million.Facebook, Inc. announced that it will raise $240 million in an equity round of funding from new investor Microsoft Corporation on October 24, 2007. As a result of the transaction, Microsoft Corporation will now hold 1.60% stake in the company. The round was raised at a post money valuation of $15,000 million.Facebook, Inc. announced that it has raised $200 million in funding from Digital Sky Technologies Limited on May 26, 2009. Digital Sky Technologies Limited invested in preferred stock and acquired 1.96% stake, valuing the company at $10 billion.So what was really happening here? What were the major events surrounding and shaping these investments? We want you to tell us the story of the business as it unfolded through these massive transactions.In order to successfully complete this assignment, you’ll have to rely on your powers to navigate the world-wide web and your ability to work backwards a bit. The information is out there if you know how to look. Remember, until recently, this was a private company so we can’t easily verify estimates on these financial numbers. So, be sure to justify your thinking with plenty of evidence from similar businesses and events. Good luck!Write a 3-4 page paper in which you:Describe the type of financing that was being used here and why it was being used.Speculate as to what the money was used for after each successive round of financing. (Don’t forget, Facebook was raising money to finance certain projects.)Provide an explanation behind the company’s bubbly corporate valuation during this time.Determine how outside investors were valuing this company. (Hint: look at similar businesses).Estimate the company’s major financial numbers (revenue and net income) based on the implied valuation of the most recent investment.Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; references must follow JWMI style guide and writing format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required page length.Click.strayer.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/JWMI/531/Week%205/Week%205%20Assignment%205%20Grading%20Rubric.html”>hereto view the grading rubric.GRADELast Graded AttemptAssignment 3: Take Your PickDue Week 9 and worth 165 pointsIntroduction:We’d like you to design and develop strategy for a large, public company. And, we’d like you to do so using the themes within the two modules we’ve just completed: Risk Management and the International module. Essentially, we’d like to put you into the shoes of the CEO and design a few key strategies that would help grow earnings and reduce risk in the company’s operations.Let’s get a bit more specific. Pick a public company (preferably one you’ve examined before) and examine what the company is doing now, both in terms of risk management global strategy. In particular, here’s what we recommend you do:Pull up a company’s annual report (10-K).Read the entire section titled “ Item 1†(includes items describing the general business) and “Item 1A†(also known as the risks section).Then, read the section titled “ Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.â€Next, examine the company’s international business situation. Sometimes, this information is located in a section called “Operating Segments†other times it is not. You might have to dig around for this info.Also, search the document (hitting CTRL+F usually does the trick) and enter keywords that include “ derivatives†and “hedging.â€What do you see? What is the business doing right now?Write a 3-4 page paper in which you:Analyze the company’s existing risk management and international strategies.Prescribe new strategies for the business based on what they are and are not doing now in these areasYour assignment must follow these formatting requirements:Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; references must follow JWMI style guide and writing format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required page length.The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:Explain the influence of leverage and risk on financial planning.Develop a corporate strategy based on basic financial reports.Use technology and information resources to research issues in advanced financial management.Write clearly and concisely about advanced financial management using proper writing mechanicsAssignment 4:The Corporate RundownDue Week 10 and worth 165 pointsIntroduction:At the risk of repeating ourselves, let’s let Mr. Charlie Munger, co-chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway, say his piece on the power of financial incentives once more, “ Never, ever think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.†Of course, we agree. And we want you to learn how to evaluate financial incentives that you’ll discover in the corporate world. We also want you to be able to assess relatively strong and weak corporate governance systems. That’s the crux of this final assignment.First, what we’d like you to do is to identify a public company (preferably one that you’re familiar with from prior assignments). Then, we’d like you to examine and analyze its governance principles, structures, and practices.We firmly believe that the effective financial decision maker will understand the power that governance and strong systems have over financial performance, and thus it’s important to train ourselves to be acutely aware of these issues. Here’s how we recommend approaching the assignment:Head to edgar.sec.gov to access your company’s financial statements (or any site where you feel comfortable accessing your company’s financial statements, including the company’s own homepage).Pull up the proxy statement (it’v s also called the 14A, the DEF14A, and occasionally the PRE14A).Readin entiretyand reflect.Write a 3-4 page paper in which you:Determine is the board seems appropriately constituted Are these people qualified to be governing a business of this type? (Read their bios and even Google them for more info)Assess the committees the board members sit on and if they are appropriately staffed.Assess the management, how long have they been with the company, and their relative experienceEvaluate the board’s philosophy on executive compensation.Discuss the metrics the CEO’s inventive compensation are tied to and whether they are sound metrics or not.Determine if compensation is reasonable, considering the company’s financial performance.Determine if related party transactions (sometimes called “transactions with related partiesâ€) exist, and if they do, whether they are reasonable.Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; references must follow JWMI style guide and writing format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required page length.The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:Use technology and information resources to research issues in advanced financial management.Write clearly and concisely about advanced financial management using proper writing mechanics.
