FIN 6406 Research Paper Guidelines - CMBA

FIN 6406 Corporate Finance
Research Project
Overview
After completing your MBA degree, you will very likely be in a position to help increase the
fundamental value of your company. All the courses of the MBA have been designed to give you
the financial tools and analytical skills required to be successful financial managers. In FIN 6406, a
research project has been designed to help prepare you for this challenge in the workplace. In this
application assignment, you will utilize aspects of what you have learned to produce a financial
quarterly trend analysis of one company. This is a group project and one report per group is to be
submitted.
For this research project, you will select a publicly traded company to investigate over the course
of the following weeks. You may choose a company where you are currently employed, a company
where you might seek employment, a company you’ve read about, or a company that piques your
interest. For instance, you may research Starbucks (stock symbol SBUX) because you drink a latte
every day, Toyota (TM) because you drive their cars or have been following the news, or Amazon
(AMZN) because you are interested in their electronic reading experience, the Kindle.
You will use research sources, such as Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money, for the financial
highlights and trading information on your selected company. Using these sites, you will compute
the ratios for the four most recent quarters of your chosen company. An Excel template will be
provided for you to compute these ratios.
In Week 6, you will complete the research project by submitting the final results in a formal report.
Create your report as a Word document, which you will then attach. This report will include your
ratio computations, a financial trend comparison, an industry-performance comparative financial
analysis, and a comparative SWOT analysis. Most important, you will make decisions about what
you as an investor have to lose or gain by investing in your selected company. You will also
assume the role of a member of the Board of Directors of a bank that will consider whether to
extend the company a line of credit. In this culminating activity, the knowledge you have gained
and the skills you have practiced will be applied in a report similar to those you will eventually
execute on a regular basis.
The Guidelines for this Research Project follow.
Start the project report by providing the following information necessary for your research:
1. The name of the publicly traded company you will investigate

2. A brief paragraph (25 - 50 words) describing why you chose that particular company
3. The sources you used to research the financial health of the company and its competitors
Then use the Excel spreadsheet posted in the Content section of Blackboard to input quarterly
financial data for your chosen company. Produce a report which includes an analysis of the
financial position of the company. Create your report as a Word document by copying the Excel
spreadsheet into the document. This report will include your ratio computations, a financial trend
comparison and an industry-performance comparative financial analysis.
1
The Guidelines for this Research Project follow:

Cover Page: Should look like this:
FIN 6406
A Financial Ratio Quarterly Trend Analysis of:
Name of Corporation
Stock Symbol
Listed on ____Exchange
Prepared for:
Dr. Edward Lawrence
Department of Finance
Florida International University
In partial fulfillment of the
requirements of Course:
FIN 6406
By:
Your Names
Your Panther Identification Student Numbers
Section A
Computations
Using the following Excel template, compute the ratios for the four most recent quarters of your
chosen company. Sources of free data include Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Research at least
three Web sites to obtain the most accurate and reliable information. By using at least three
sources, you will be able to select the financial information from two of the sources with the most
closely corresponding information.
Section B
Financial Trend Comparison
For each of the five ratio categories: Liquidity, Asset Utilization, Profitability, Debt Utilization, and
Market Values, write a paragraph regarding the trend and implications about the future financial
health of the company.
Section C
Comparative Financial Analysis of the company compared to the industry performance.
Write a paragraph regarding your company’s comparative performance to the industry average for
the most recent year.
Section D
Complete a Comparative SWOT ANALYSIS for your company:
· Strengths
· Weaknesses
· Opportunities
· Threats
Section E
Business ethics, as defined by Corporate Finance (2009) text authors’ Ehrhardt and Brigham, “are
a company’s attitude and conduct toward its employees, customers, community, and stockholders”
(p.7). In this section, provide an analysis of the ethics of your company that answers the following
questions:
2
• Is there a well defined code of ethics or code of conduct?
• Is there evidence of continued and repeated emphasis by the Board of Directors or the CEO,
of the importance of ethical conduct to the corporation and its business ventures?
• What processes are in place (if any) that make it safe and easy for employees or other
interested parties to report ethical lapse?
Include documentation from your research that supports your analysis of the ethics of your
company.
Section F
Conclusion and Decisions
Based on the analyses above, arrive at a conclusion by writing a paragraph for each of the
following three decisions. You must support your conclusions with reasoned statements as to why
or why not.
Decisions
1. Would you place a personal deposit of one million dollars or more in the publicly traded
stock of this company?
2. Would you invest $500,000 in the debt (bonds) of this company?
3. If you were a member of the Board of Directors of a bank and you sat on that Bank’s Credit
Committee, would you grant a one million dollar line of credit for Overnight or Term Federal
Funds to this company?
Bibliography
All sources are to be shown in accordance with APA manual of style, including Web pages.
Employ a minimum of three sources with proper citations and incorporate your research into your
essay. Include footnotes or endnotes, as well as works cited, at the conclusion of your paper. If
information is downloaded from the Internet, make sure you put the date it was accessed.
If quoting anything either directly or indirectly, give credit where credit is due with quotation marks
as well as footnotes, endnotes or intext citations. For assistance on how to use proper APA
citations, please see the APA Citation Guide in the Resources Folder or check out this resource.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01

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FIN 6406 Corporate Finance

The Guidelines for this Research Project follow.

1. The name of the publicly traded company you will investigate

The Guidelines for this Research Project follow:

• Is there a well defined code of ethics or code of conduct?

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