Applying Investment Decision Rules for Startups

In the previous course, you learned financial statement analysis and how to make estimate of future financial status. In this course, you are going to learn capital budgeting. That is, how to make an investment decision. You would like to select the best project among various projects you can take. Then, you need to know the criteria. In this course, you are going to learn investment decision criteria such as NPV and IRR, which are most popular decision rules. Using financial analysis and discounted cash flow method, you can make pro forma financial statement and estimate project cash flows. Then, you apply investment criteria to determine whether to invest or not. After learning how to apply NPV and IRR method to investment decision, you are going to learn how to evaluate NPV estimate and scenario, what-if analyses and break-even analysis. In addition to NPV and IRR, you are going to learn Payback period method and Profitability method to determine whether to invest or not when there is a political risk or capital rationing.

• Capital Budgeting techniques
• Capital budgeting is the process of deciding whether to undertake an investment project. In this module, you will study the three most popular capital budgeting techniques in practice: Net present value (NPV), Payback period, and Internal rate of return (IRR).
• Project Analysis
• In this module, you will learn how to estimate project cash flows using Excel. Overall, project cash flow analysis is similar to firm-level cash flow analysis. However, there also exist some unique features of a project cash flow analysis, which requires us to study the project cash flow principles.
• Issues in Capital Budgeting
• Sometimes you have to evaluate multiple projects at a time. In this module, you will learn how to choose the best project among multiple projects. We will also discuss various important issues in NPV and IRR techniques. Finally, we discuss the fundamental principle in choosing the discount rate.
• Real Options in Business Projects
• We continue to study analyzing business projects, but the difference in this module is that now we consider the value of "real options" embedded in the project. You will learn how to estimate the project's value by using the decision tree approach or the Black-Scholes option pricing model.