The Top Finance Skills that CA Student should Possess Hey everyone! This article is an attempt to list down some of the skills required in the finance profession and some useful resources that can help you. There are multiple career paths that one can choose within the finance field. Some of them are: Commercial banking Corporate Finance Credit Analysis Equity Research Investment Banking Private Equity & VC Wealth Management While all these profiles require varying skill sets and qualifications, there are a few basic skills which are common across many of these fields: Financial Reporting & Analysis Industry/Business Analysis Valuation & Corporate Finance Financial Modeling
Financial Reporting & Analysis A large part of finance is understanding businesses, and in order to do that well, a sound knowledge of accounting is essential. While you may not need to know how to actually make financial statements, being able to read them and to draw inferences from them is an important skill to have. There are several highly-rated courses on financial reporting available on Coursera, many of which are free unless you want a certificate of completion. The popular ones are: Financial Accounting Fundamentals (offered by University of Virginia) Introduction to Financial Accounting (offered by University of Pennsylvania) Go through the course content and the expected time commitment for the 4-5 top-rated courses, and choose the one that best meets your requirements. However, do note that most of these courses do not go into a lot of depth, and are beneficial only if you are an absolute beginner. If you want to understand how to read and interpret financial...
Valuation & Corporate Finance The most-commonly used and perhaps the best resource to learn about corporate valuations is Professor Aswath’s Damodaran’s writings and courses. Prof. Damodaran teaches at NYU, and is widely regarded as the authority on valuation and corporate finance. You can either go through his video lectures or you can read his books . For video lectures, you can either see his full lectures (classroom lecture recordings) or smaller condensed lectures. I feel that the latter are enough to understand the basics, and you can watch the former if you want to see the principles being applied. If you are just starting out, the smaller lectures are advisable: [Short] Valuation [Short] Corporate Finance [Full] Valuation [Full] Corporate Finance If you prefer books, Damodaran on Valuation is an excellent book. A relatively lesser known book which I found really useful is Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by McKinsey & Co. I believ...
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