The focus of this class is the development of a set of practical skills that you will use throughout your career: the ability to understand financial statements deeply and intuitively. I fundamentally believe that it is impossible to gain these skills by listening to a professor talk, and so class time will be spent on learning by doing as much as is possible. If you want to leave this class with a profound confidence in your ability to analyze financial statements, you need to spend time actually analyzing them.
As part of this ethos, only the first part of each class will be spent on lecture. The second part of each class will be used to work individually to apply the skills we learned during the lecture. The final part of each class will be an opportunity for the students who learned the material most effectively to teach their peers the skills that they have developed. This “See one, do one, teach one” approach allows the students who master these skills to recontextualize them through teaching while simultaneously making sure that their peers have as many opportunities as possible to gain skill with financial statement analysis.

We will start the class by covering some of the basics I expect you to understand from accounting and quickly move from there. I want to get you working with real financial statements as soon as possible, and so each week’s class will include a period of hands on work where you apply the content that we discussed. We will analyze the most recent financial statements of American, Taiwanese, and Chinese firms together and you will share your analyses with your peers. Be prepared to work together to improve your fluency with reported financial information.
The course will cover three broad topics: the analysis of financial statements, industry identification using financial statements, and equity valuation. You should feel confident deploying each of these tools by the end of the semester.