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Fundamentals of Corporate Finance Notes

Goals and Governance of the Corporation Based on the questions at the end of chapter 1 of Fundamentals of Corporate Finance International Edition (11th edition) by Brealey, Myers, Marcus. A security is a tradeable financial instrument, such as a stock, bond, option, future, or mutual fund. Companies usually buy real assets. These include both tangible assets (such as trademarks, trucks, lands, and labour) and intangible assets (such as brand names). The decision about which assets to buy is usually termed the capital budgeting or investment decision. Stocking up on inventory, developing new software, and selling a warehouse, are all investment decisions.

Thursday, January 11, 2024 | 11 minutes Read

Consumption 2023 Highlights

The highlights and LLM analysis of my 2023 Consumption.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024 | 55 minutes Read

Consumption 2023

All of my 2023 Consumption notes on one page.

Sunday, December 31, 2023 | 231 minutes Read

Analysing my YouTube Likes

Like most people, I watch a lot of YouTube. Probably too much. When I like a video, I typically Like it. I was curious, so I decided to analyse my Likes. Getting the data When you download your YouTube data using Takeout (https://takeout.google.com/), it doesn’t seem to include your Likes playlist, so I had to find an alternative method. IFTTT This method requires pre-planning. IFTTT has an applet, “If New liked video, then Add row to my Google Drive spreadsheet”. It does what it says. However, I only activated this in April, so I don’t have my Likes from before then. I could use this next year though.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 3 minutes Read

Innovating Aston Martin

I’ve always loved Aston Martin. Their cars are quintessentially British; six different models have featured in the James Bond movies, with the DB5 starring in eight different Bond films. Established in 110 years ago in 1913, they’re on the of the few remaining British automotive manufacturers. They’re beautiful, they sound amazing, and they have an incredibly heritage. However, as a company, they’re not doing that well. They listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 at a market cap of ~ $5bn; by 2020 it had dropped to <$ 1bn, up to ~ $4bn in 2021, down to ~$ 0.5bn in 2022, before recovering to ~ $3.5bn in 2023. Currently, in Q4 2023, it sits at ~$ 2.5bn. In other words, the value of the company has varied dramatically since it IPO’d, and the overall trend is fairly negative.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 | 4 minutes Read

Lotus New Market Strategy

Something I threw together for a bit of fun. What if the car brand Lotus wanted to expand into a new market? The PPTX deck can be found here. Main image source: Wikipedia.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Explore a Career in Business Analysis (LinkedIn Learning)

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/paths/explore-a-career-in-business-analysis https://www.iiba.org/career-resources/a-business-analysis-professionals-foundation-for-success/babok/ What Is Business Analysis? https://www.linkedin.com/learning/what-is-business-analysis Provide a bridge between technical and business viewpoints As a Professional: Certification (IIBA, BCS, …) Competencies: e.g. facilitation, problem-solving, negotiation, industry/organisational knowledge Research Career paths Internally, from a commercial (marketing, sales, finance) role Internally, from an IT role (e.g. product support) As a graduate who enjoys problem solving, research, analysis Business Analysis Foundations https://www.linkedin.com/learning/business-analysis-foundations-4 Introduction “The practise of enabling change in the context of an enterprise by defining the needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders” - IIBA

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 | 6 minutes Read

$100M Offers - Alex Hormozi

Grand Slam Offers “Make people an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no.” It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers . . . forever removing the cash constraint on business growth.

Wednesday, November 8, 2023 | 22 minutes Read

Two Weeks in Korea

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been in Korea (yes, the South one). I thought I’d reflect back on my trip, and offer a few pieces of advice for anyone who happens to read this and is thinking of heading over. Life in Korea I lived in Korea back in 2017/2018. Returning now, as a holiday and after a few years away, allowed me to see it in a slightly different light to when I jumped straight into living and working there.

Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Six Months in a New City

This week marks six months since I’ve moved back to London. I last lived here in 2015, so it’s been a solid few years away! Half a year on, I thought I’d reflect on what’s gone well, what’s gone less well, what I’ve learnt, and what I hope my future time in England’s capital. House and Home For the first three months I was lodging with a couple. Without going into too much detail, this did not go particularly well - but I learnt from the experience. For example, while I want to live in a clean and tidy place, I’m not the type to vacuum the entire house multiple times a day. I also prefer a relatively social house, one where housemates speak with each other, guests are allowed, one without unspoken curfews. Also, I first-hand experienced the disadvantages of live-in landlords not requiring to hold a lodger’s deposit with a third party, but instead having total control over what they feel requires deductions. I also learnt about small claims court procedures.

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Bookmarklets

Introduction Bookmarklets are bookmarks with special powers. Effectively, they let you run JavaScript in a browser, which means you can inject JavaScript into a webpage. The first code block is the bookmarklet itself; create a new bookmark and use this code as the URL. The second code block is the unencoded naked JavaScript; this can be edited then put through the bookmarklet creator found in Useful tools. Reload webpage on timer Useful for stopping a webpage timing out, which may also log you out.

Wednesday, October 4, 2023 | 3 minutes Read

BYD Auto Analysis: 3Cs, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, SWOT, 7Ps, Porter’s Five Forces, STEEPLE

A quick review of BYD Auto, focussing on EVs, using a number of frameworks.

Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | 4 minutes Read