Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies - Michael Taillard - Страница 8

Introduction

In case you couldn’t already tell, this book is about corporate finance. If you were looking for poodle grooming, you picked up the wrong book. Go try again.

Corporate finance is the study of how groups of people work together as a single organization to provide something of value to society. If a corporation is using up more value than it’s producing, it will lose money and fail. In corporate finance, you measure value using money, and the final goal of a corporation is to make money.

Ensuring that a corporation is financially successful is far more complicated than simply ensuring that a corporation is profitable, though. Throughout this book, I discuss a wide range of topics in corporate finance. This is an introductory book, after all, so think of it as a sampler or a greatest-hits album — it’s everything you need in order to understand what corporate finance is and how to begin functioning on a basic level in the world of finance.

About This Book

This book is a little different from other corporate finance books. First of all, it’s better. More useful than that, though, is that this book is written and organized so that people with absolutely no understanding of corporate finance can use it as a reference guide. It’s also a wonderfully interesting read.

Everything in this book is written as if you’re a complete newbie. The little details are pointed out, and when stuff gets too complicated, I just summarize the topic. I also explain — or at least clarify — everything, in normal everyday language, without trying to sound very technical. This book is all about making the subject of corporate finance accessible to everyone, while also trying to keep it from being too dry. Corporate finance books can be really boring, which is sad because they don’t need to be.

To enhance your reading experience, I use the following conventions:

 New terms are in italics, with an easy-to-understand definition provided nearby.

 Bold is used to highlight key words and phrases in bulleted and numbered lists.

 In math equations, variables are italicized to set them apart from letters.

To make the content more accessible, I divided it into six parts:

 Part 1, What’s Unique about Corporate Finance: This part talks a lot about what money is, what corporate finance is and the role it plays, and the people and organizations that utilize corporate financial information.

 Part 2, Making a Statement: Reading financial statements is a lot easier than learning a language, but odds are this process is going to be just as new to you, so I take several chapters to break it down easily.

 Part 3, Valuations on the Price Tags of Business: Before you buy or invest in something, how do you figure out what it’s worth? You start by reading the chapters in this part!

 Part 4, A Wonderland of Risk Management: The chapters in this part deal heavily in risk and cover some of the more cutting-edge topics in corporate finance.

 Part 5, Financial Management: Find out about evaluating corporate financial performance, forecasting future financial performance, and assessing the performance of other corporations for potential mergers and acquisition (M&A).

 Part 6, The Part of Tens: Each chapter in this part includes ten things you really should know, whether you intend to pursue corporate finance or not.

Foolish Assumptions

While writing this book, I’ve done my best to assume that you, the reader, know absolutely nothing. That being said, no one is perfect. I strive to point out the details, and when stuff gets too complicated, I just summarize the topic. I also explain — or at least clarify — everything, in normal everyday language, without trying to sound very technical. This book is all about making the subject of corporate finance accessible to everyone, while also trying to keep it from being too dry. Corporate finance books can be boring, which is sad because they don’t need to be. This book is a bit heavy on the math. Yes, I know, math is hard. I never liked it, either. That’s why the majority of the math is supplemented with explanations of how to do the calculations that’s simple enough to spare you from needing to know how to actually read math.

You can also supplement the information in this book by checking out Accounting For Dummies by John A. Tracy (Wiley). It can help give you more detail about these topics. I really tried to only include those details relevant to the subject of corporate finance.

Other than that, if you’re reading this right now, then you’re prepared to begin reading Corporate Finance For Dummies!

Icons Used in This Book

You’ll see a few icons scattered around the book. These icons highlight bits of information that are of particular importance to you. Here’s what to look for:

Professionals get good at what they do by making stupid mistakes and learning from them. Now you can learn from these stupid mistakes without the unfortunate side effects usually associated with making them yourself. Just look for the Tip icon.

Whenever you see this icon, it means that you may one day need to remember the information included. You may want to consider keeping it in mind.

When you see this icon, it means that I’m talking about something that may pose a serious threat. I’m not being facetious this time, either. Corporate finance is a study in money, and this is an intro book, so in some instances, you really should just go talk to a professional before you get yourself or others into financial or legal trouble.

When you see this icon, it means that the information that follows is a deeper dive into a more advanced topic that is helpful to know, but not necessary.

New to this Edition

First, and arguably more importantly, the writing in this edition has been cleaned up quite a lot and just generally improved over the previous edition. As for content, there are new sections added to this book, such as addressing cryptocurrency and quantitative finance. Information and examples have been updated, while some outdated content was removed.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the abundance of information and guidance related to corporate finance that I provide in this book, you get access to even more help and information online at Dummies.com. Check out this book's online Cheat Sheet. Just go to www.dummies.com and search for “Corporate Finance For Dummies Cheat Sheet.”

Where to Go from Here

This book isn’t linear. I didn’t write the chapters in order, and you don’t have to read them in order. However, you may want to begin with the chapters that are included in Parts 2 and 3 before attempting the chapters in Parts 4 and 5. At least flip through the earlier pages to make sure that you’re familiar with how to read financial statements and the time value of money before you attempt to move on to Parts 4 and 5. As long as you’re familiar with both those things, nothing in this book will be out of your reach.