An up-and-coming staffer at a small family foundation was considering whether to recommend a corporate bond investment to the foundation's investment committee. Her exploration was inspired by an article that identified some attractive corporate bond investments, and she was examining the merits of specific bond issues from Allegiant Travel, GameStop, and Western Union. Information is provided that would support a variety of bond pricing analyses, with a focus on uncovering possible mispricing and the drivers of that mispricing.
This case follows a senior loan officer who is reviewing requests from two customers of the bank to raise their credit limits. The two businesses are alike in many ways, but the loan officer believes one represents a greater problem. The students must use a ratio and financial analysis (all ratios are provided, as the challenge is not calculating ratios but interpreting them) to identify which of the two is worthy of concern. The emphasis in this case is on interpretation rather than calculation, though an instructor can explore definitions and calculations as desired. By hinting that there is a conclusion that can be reached, students are motivated to view their analyses as supporting a judgement. Just as ratios essentially link line items to provide insight, judgement links ratios to tell a story. An intentional feature of this case is that the judgement is relatively clear, and students will finish with a sense of success.
Managers need to be comfortable with financial statement forecasting. Forecasts allow managers to plan properly by weighing consequences and preparing for outcomes. A less-recognized but equally important benefit is that the act of forecasting forces managers to make explicit the many links that exist between decisions, possibly drawing attention to constraints that otherwise might have been overlooked. This is particularly important since financial statements integrate the financial and operating decisions of a firm. This note focuses on forecasting in the context of decision-making. Aspects of forecasting explored include: revenue growth estimates, sources of error, assumptions, typical ratios, and the T-account approach. It also includes a detailed example of a typical financial forecast. The concepts are applied to the hypothetical firm Morgan Industries, a setting that has been integrated across all the Financial Analytics Toolkit series of technical notes. While this note focuses on financial statements, the forecasting techniques described herein are readily transferred to related contexts, such as building cash-flow forecasts and using ratios to evaluate financial performance.
This note describes the most common financial ratios and how they provide insight into firm performance. The emphasis is on how ratios summarize operating behaviors and results in ways that facilitate interpretation and highlight decisions. There are three broad categories of ratios covered in the note: profitability, operating efficiency, and leverage (the use of debt financing). The note defines the ratios, explains how they provide insight, and explores complications related to their use. The concepts in this note are applied to the firm Morgan Industries, a setting that has been integrated across all the Financial Analytics Toolkit series of technical notes.
This note reviews the basics of projecting cash flows for a typical operating decision. To find the economic consequences of any decision, one needs to project the cash flow effects of that decision and discount those at the appropriate hurdle rate. The focus on cash flows arises because any evaluation of economic impact must recognize opportunity costs-the other uses to which one might allocate resources available to a firm. This note discusses two typical ways to organize operating information to calculate cash flow, typically referred to as free cash flow in this context. The first estimates the cash consequences related to various elements of a decision. The second starts with a typical accounting estimate of operating income before taxes and then makes adjustments. The concepts in this note are applied to the firm Morgan Industries, a setting that has been integrated across all the Financial Analytics Toolkit series of technical notes.
In September 2017, a senior portfolio manager at Portland Capital Management had all her attention focused on the upcoming initial public offering (IPO) of Roku, Inc. The company had just updated its initial filing to indicate an offer price between $12 and $14, and Portland Capital Management had an opportunity to take a substantial position in that offering. She saw the upside potential in Roku's shift from hardware-related revenue streams (player sales) to platform-related revenue streams (advertising and content purchases made on the platform). But she was also well aware of the riskiness of this strategy and the uncertain state of IPO markets at that time.
Central to a firm's long-term success, is allocating capital so that it generates economic value. The two most common decision rules based on economic value are to (i) accept proposals that have a positive net present value (NPV) when discounted at the appropriate hurdle rate or (ii) to accept proposals whose internal rate of return (IRR) exceeds the appropriate hurdle rate. Key to both rules, in economic terms, the hurdle rate reflects the appropriate opportunity cost of devoting capital to the given proposal rather than an equally risky alternative. The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) is the most commonly used hurdle rate, and this note explains why it is useful as a hurdle rate, discusses how it is calculated, and explores some issues related to its use. A one-page summary of implementation best practices is also provided.
Quentin Bell, the owner of a small oil extraction firm, BE Oil, owns the rights to drill on six different wells. Drilling requires substantial up-front costs, and each well has different drilling costs and production capability. Bell's challenge is to decide which wells to drill based on his expectation of the price of oil when it is extracted. The case was written for use in Darden's global economies and markets (GEM) core course during a class on the economics of competitive markets. The concepts of supply, demand, and equilibrium are often obscure to students at this early stage in the course, and this case provides a concrete example of how a firm in a competitive commodity market determines how much oil to produce. Students are asked to derive the firm's supply curve, relate that to the oil market supply curve, and ultimately recommend how much oil the firm should plan to produce. The plan pushes students to think about marginal cost/ marginal benefit analysis, implicitly at first and explicitly at the end of class. Students are also asked to consider how exogenous variables in the oil market affect the oil price and the firm's decision.
It was generally accepted that the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for a company reflected an appropriate hurdle rate (minimum return or benchmark) for that company's investments. But a WACC for Langtry Falls could not be calculated because the company did not have publicly traded stock, a critical source of one input to the calculation. However, the benchmark for publicly traded competing companies would be meaningful to Langtry-these companies were facing the same underlying risks and competing under the same economic conditions. An average of the industry WACCs would be a defensible and informative benchmark for Langtry.
In 2017, Peter Tang must prepare the economic analysis of a proposal to insource production of certain parts currently purchased by the Tower and Lattice (TAL) division of Akron Crane Works (ACW), a world leader in heavy lifting machinery. The primary motivations for the proposal were rising costs due to vendor price increases and long vendor lead times. The TAL division believed internal production would cost less and that, with increased control of production, the division could reduce lead times and even reduce working capital needs.
The CEO of Central Express Trucking (CXT), was preoccupied as he drove to work one morning in late October 2013. Diesel fuel prices had been a constant concern at the trucking company he had started 22 years ago. Over the last decade, the steady rise in fuel prices had squeezed margins and dampened profits. Yet despite the existence of fuel surcharges in all of CXT's contracts, short-term fuel price fluctuations still drove fluctuations in profitability. On his mind that morning was a proposal from the newest member of his sales team to offer a contract to a customer (shipper) that did not include a fuel surcharge.