1.1 Introduction to Finance

J: Hi, I’m Jim Stice.

K: And I’m Kay Stice. We’re brothers, and we are both business school professors at Brigham Young University.

J:  We have been teaching in business schools around the world for a combined total of 70 years.  We have taught in the United States,

K: Hong Kong,

J:  France,

K: Russia,

J: Singapore,

K:  Shanghai, Beijing, Kazakhstan,

J: and South Africa.

K: This course is an introduction to the field of finance.

J: As you will learn, we are all SURROUNDED by finance…

K: deciding what things to buy, and not to buy,

J: getting the money to buy the things that you have decided that you need, and

K: efficiently managing the resources that you have.

J: This is FINANCE: What to buy, where to get the money to buy it, and how to manage it once you have it.

K: As you can imagine, FINANCE is important to individuals, to families, to companies, to governments … really, to ALL organizations.

J: As we learn about finance, we are going to look at the financial reports of Walmart.

K: We are going to see the roller-coaster cash flow pattern of Toys R Us.

J: We will learn the secrets of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the “Cap M.”

K: We will talk about trading stocks and bonds and look at the IPOs of Microsoft and Facebook.

J: We’ll learn what an “investment bank” is.

K: I’ll show you the financial analysis that I did in trying to decide whether to buy a car when my family lived in Hong Kong.

J: And we’ll end with some basic principles of personal financing planning.

K: So what does a person need to know to take this course?

J: There are no prerequisites for this course. This is a general introduction to finance, so you don't need any specialized knowledge. We will explain any new terms that we introduce.

K: We will use lots of real-life illustrations. We will talk about Microsoft and Walmart and Facebook because finance exists in the real world.

J: So, join us in the study of … FINANCE.