Here it is! The entire semester in a nutshell. This session goes into detail about the relationship between risk and return. We cover the widely used, yet imperfect measurement for risk, standard deviation, and show how historically, the investments with the highest rates of return have demonstrated the greatest risk. Do you want to eat well or do you want to sleep well?

What are the major investment asset classes? What returns can we reasonably expect from each over the long term? What risks are involved with each investment type? This presentation will answer these preliminary questions about the major investment types from general perspective. (Relax. We will get into the details about each as the course progresses. For now, make sure you understand what is in the presentation.)

This initial presentation is a gentle introduction to the concept of investing. You do not need any prior investment experience. Forget everything that you have heard from the talking heads on television or the InfernalNet or your brother-in-law, the self-anointed financial wizard. We start from the very beginning with the simple question, "What is an investment?"

Get out those financial statements and let's calculate some financial ratios. In the second part of the chapter 17 presentation, we compute the profitability, liquidity, activity, and leverage financial ratios for Sprouts, the specialty grocery store chain. On your own, it would a great exercise to do the same for their major competitors such as Kroger and maybe Amazon (which owns Whole Foods).

The Discounted Cash Flow Model is the last Dividend Discount Model that we will study. It is also the most powerful, in my humble opinion. In addition, the previous Dividend Discount Models all expected the company to be paying dividends. But what if the company does not pay any dividends? We can also use the Discounted Cash Flow Model to assign a value to a stock that pays no dividends. Very cool! (In fact, we can use this model with any potential investment – stay tuned.) Lastly, all these...

Welcome to the heart of our course! We are going to learn how to discount a future stream of dividend income. Huh? What that means is that we are going to learn how to assign a value to the stock on the basis of the cash flows that result from the dividends that the stock is paying. To do this, we will use the Dividend Discount Models. This is it, Dear Students! This is the heart of our course!