Free online courseCorporate Finance

Course Description

Strong corporate finance skills help you answer the questions that matter most in business: Is this project worth funding, what is a company truly worth, and how much risk are we taking to earn a return? This free online course is designed to give you a practical, decision-focused understanding of corporate finance so you can move beyond formulas and start thinking like a finance professional. Whether you are preparing for a business role, sharpening analytical skills for entrepreneurship, or aiming to communicate better with finance teams, you will learn frameworks that translate directly to real workplace decisions.

You will start with the logic that sits underneath almost every financial model: the time value of money. From there, the course builds confidence with discounting and compounding, effective annual rates, and the key building blocks for valuing single cash flows, annuities, perpetuities, and growing cash-flow streams. By practicing these ideas repeatedly, you will develop intuition for how interest rates, timing, and growth affect value, and why small changes in assumptions can materially alter an outcome.

As you progress, you connect valuation to capital budgeting and corporate strategy. You learn to evaluate opportunities with net present value, handle practical twists such as taxes, and understand how to make choices when investments compete with each other. The course also explains where internal rate of return helps, where it can mislead, and how it compares with simpler decision tools like payback. Along the way, you will see how free cash flow links operating performance to enterprise value, and how concepts like dividend policy, payout approaches, and discounted cash flow tie market pricing back to fundamentals.

The program then broadens into risk and return, giving you the tools to interpret volatility, diversification, beta, the market risk premium, and models such as CAPM, as well as performance measures like Sharpe and Treynor ratios and alpha. Finally, you gain perspective on corporate transactions and governance through mergers and acquisitions concepts, common deal terms, defenses against hostile takeovers, and due diligence topics like quality of earnings. With short checks and applied exercises, you will finish with a clearer, more confident ability to analyze investments, value companies, and support high-stakes financial decisions.