Essay (financial topic) - Assignment 1

Assignment 1: What’s It Worth?

Here’s the assignment: pick a publicly traded company of your choosing. It should be one you’re familiar with, one that sells a product that you’ve used or seen, and one you would like to understand better. Then, we’re going to ask you to evaluate the company closely. You should go about doing this using any materials you can get your hands on, including the following:

o Financial Statements

o Investor Presentations

o Industry Reports

o Newspaper/Magazine Articles

o Consumer Reviews

o Etc.

• Once you’ve gotten a firm hold on the company, its financial standing, and its competitive

positioning, then ensure in the essay that you will include all of the following:

Write a 3-4 page essay paper about advanced financial management using proper writing mechanics in which you do the following:

1. Analyze the company’s competition advantages, including the Sellers framework.

2. Analyze the company’s stock value. This will include analysis of a company’s present P/E, PEG,

P/B, and P/S multiples versus competitors in the industry and versus historic multiples going over

the past 1-, 3-, and 5-year periods. You are expected to offer an opinion as to the current pricing

of the company’s stock. You are also welcome to perform a DCF analysis utilizing appropriate

growth rates and discount rate, but this is not required.

3. Assess the company’s fixed-income makeup. Please identify the bonds that the company has

issued, the amounts of those bonds, their structure, their various due dates, and their various

interest rates. You may also want to identify their market values versus par values, but it is not

required.

Your assignment should adhere to these guidelines:

• Write in a logical, well-organized, conventional business style. Use Times New Roman font size

12 or similar, double-space, and leave ample white space per page.

• All references must follow JWMI style guide, and works must be cited appropriately. Check with

your professor for any additional instructions on citations.

• On the first page or in a header, include the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the

professor’s name, the course title, and the date. Title and reference pages are not included in the

assignment page length.

• Faculty have discretion to penalize for assignments over or under the assignment guidelines.

Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic/organization of the paper, and

language and writing skills, using the following grading criteria.