Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA®)

Goals

What will you learn in this course:

Accounting (5% of course weight)

• Identify key items on the financial statements and describe the interrelationship between all the components.
• Explain the fundamental accounting principles that underly detailed accounting standards.
• Identify the key accounting standards commonly encountered by financial analysts and explain the impact on financial statements and financial models.

Excel (17% of course weight)

• Utilize the keyboard shortcuts to save time and be more efficient in Excel.
• Conduct data analysis using data tables, pivot tables, and other common functions.
• Use advanced formulas and functions to enhance the functionality of financial models.

Finance (23% of course weight)

• Explain key concepts around capital investments, the capital-raising process, different forms of financing, and the optimal capital structure.
•  Assess the profitability, efficiency, returns, and value of a business using common financial ratios and analytical tool.
•  Use key statistical measures to assess trends and relationships within sets of data.

Financial Modeling (25% of course weight)

• Build a dynamic, logically designed, well-structured 3-statement financial model.
• Create multi-year forecasts for the income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet.
• Perform scenario and sensitivity analyses to enhance the robustness of the financial modeling.

Valuation (10% of course weight)

• Identify the different valuation methodologies and discuss the pros and cons of each.
• Perform a valuation analysis using comparable company and precedent transactions analysis.
• Calculate the weighted-average cost of capital and construct a DCF model in Excel.

Budgeting and Forecasting (8% of course weight)

• Apply various forecasting techniques to develop a robust financial forecast.
• Track actual performance against budgeted amounts using variance analysis and other techniques.
• Analyze the impact of a variance analysis on the financial statements and use the results to improve the budgeting process.

Presentations and Visuals (8% of course weight)

• Create insightful dashboards and advance data visualization techniques to communicate the results of financial analysis.
• Create aesthetically pleasing and insightful charts, graphs, and tables in Excel.
• Design impactful presentations to communicate key messages to a wide variety of audiences.

Strategy (4% of course weight)

• Differentiate between the different levels of a company’s strategy.
• Perform an analysis of external forces and internal competencies and assess the impact on a company’s competitive advantage.
• Generate, evaluate and select optimal strategic alternatives and tie these to a company’s mission, vision, and goals.

Prerequisites

What are the prerequisites for this course?

1. Passion for learning.
   
2. No experience is required. Start from the basics and progressively build your knowledge.
3. No prior knowledge about finance is required.
4. No materials required.
5. You don’t need to have any accounting or finance experience as we will cover all of the concepts from scratch. A requirement is that you have access to and a very basic understanding of how to use Microsoft Excel as we will use Microsoft Excel in the course as we will be analyzing and creating a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. We will also learn how to create the following from scratch using Microsoft Excel: financial models so we can come up with target prices using Discounted Cash Flow, the Weighted Average Cost of Capital, Price to Earnings, Price to Revenue, etc. – again all from scratch (assuming you have no or some accounting/finance knowledge).