Leitner

Learn corporate finance by taking a valuation apart

A discounted cash flow produces one confident number out of three guesses, and the skill is knowing which guess the number is made of. The bridge below separates them: move the discount rate, the growth rate or the margin and see exactly what each is worth. It also shows the part that embarrasses most models — how much of the answer comes from the terminal value, which is a claim about the years nobody forecast.

Move WACC, growth or margin and the bridge shows what each assumption is worth per share.

Corporate finance · valuation$46.82 PER SHARE
BASEWACCGROWTHMARGINPRICE
What WACC is

The blend of the returns debt and equity investors require, weighted by how much of the company each of them funds. It is the price of waiting: at 9% a dollar arriving in five years is worth 65 cents today, at 12% it is 57. That difference is why a quarter-point moves the price more than most operating assumptions do.

price$46.82terminal75% of value

This is the base case, so every bar between the ends is zero and the price is the base price. Move one slider and its bar becomes the part of $46.82 that assumption is responsible for. The terminal value is already 75% of it — most of this valuation is a claim about the years nobody forecast.

Start a corporate finance planThe first lesson of every plan is free

What people come here to do

You describe the goal in your own words and it asks questions back until the plan is one you would actually follow. These are the shapes that goal usually takes.

  • Prepare for finance interviews that ask me to walk through a DCF
  • Understand the model I have been handed at work
  • Pass a corporate finance module
  • Value a company properly rather than by multiples alone

What a corporate finance plan covers

Not a fixed syllabus — the plan is built around your goal and cuts what does not serve it. These are the topics it draws from, and whatever you get wrong comes back until it stops coming back.

Time value, discounting and NPV
Cost of capital: WACC, beta and the risk-free rate
Building a DCF and stress-testing it
Multiples, comparables and when they lie
Capital structure and the trade-off theory
Mergers, accretion and deal maths

Other subjects

The mechanics are the same whatever the subject — a slider is a slider whether it is moving a coefficient or a rate of return. What changes is what it is a slider for.

Or see how it works and what it costs.