Best resources to learnCorporate Finance

Accounting 101 (Damodaran Online)

Six short webcast sessions from NYU Stern covering the three statements, then where accounting rules distort them: stock compensation, R&D, and leases. Each session ships with slides and a graded post-class test. Aimed at statement users, not preparers.

Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) YouTube Channel: Excel for Finance Tutorials

Official YouTube channel offering numerous free video tutorials, tips, and walk-throughs on using Excel for financial analysis, modeling, and various finance functions, from a leading financial training institution.

Lecture 18: Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups

Stanford CS183B lecture in which Y Combinator's CFO Kirsty Nathoo and general counsel Carolynn Levy cover incorporating as a Delaware C corporation, founder equity and vesting, 83(b) elections, fundraising paperwork, bookkeeping, and cash management. Founders can avoid common early legal and accounting mistakes.

Pivotal180 Project Finance Intro

Short tutorial videos from a project finance training firm, walking through model structure, debt sizing, tax equity, and renewable energy deal mechanics. Viewers come away understanding how a project finance model is assembled and which inputs drive returns.

Edward Bodmer's YouTube Channel

Hosts hundreds of long-form screen recordings of Excel model-building with narration, covering complete models. The production quality is deliberately unprofessional, focusing on direct knowledge sharing.

📺YouTube(1)

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Session 24: Acquisition Valuation (NYU Stern Valuation)

NYU Stern class session on why most acquisitions destroy value, decomposing the price paid into synergy and control components, valuing each explicitly rather than by rule of thumb, and cataloguing seven recurring sins in deal justification.

🎓Courses(7)

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Financial Modeling for Beginners

Learn financial modeling fundamentals with this free course from BIWS. Build practical skills and start your finance career today!

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Introduction to Corporate Finance

This course provides a brief introduction to the fundamentals of finance, emphasizing their application to a wide variety of real-world situations spanning personal finance, corporate decision-making, and financial intermediation. Key concepts and applications include: time value of money, risk-return tradeoff, cost of capital, interest rates, retirement savings, mortgage financing, auto leasing, capital budgeting, asset valuation, discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, net present value, internal rate of return, hurdle rate, payback period.

Valuation Online Class (25 Webcasts)

Twenty-five short webcasts of 12 to 20 minutes each from NYU Stern's Aswath Damodaran, covering discount rates, cash flow estimation, growth, terminal value and every major multiple. Slides and post-session tests accompany each session.

APMG CP3P PPP Certification – Free Foundation Course

Free online foundation course and freely downloadable PPP Guide — a comprehensive body of knowledge developed by ADB, EBRD, IDB, IsDB, and the World Bank. Only the certification exam costs money.

Global Financing Solutions

A survey of the financing techniques banks use beyond corporate lending: project finance special purpose vehicles, securitization, leveraged buyouts and acquisition finance, commodity trade finance, and export credit agency-backed deals, taught with transaction examples from practitioners.

Corporate Finance Essentials

This Corporate Finance Essentials course provides a foundational understanding of key financial concepts relevant to companies, investors, and capital markets. You'll learn to interpret financial news, master essential financial vocabulary, and understand core accounting principles. No prior knowledge required. By the end of this course, you will be able to analyze company financial statements, understand basic investment strategies, and apply financial principles to business decision-making. This knowledge will be invaluable for your career in finance or accounting. Limited free materials available.

Advanced Corporate Finance

IIM Bangalore's five-week introduction to the tools managers use to evaluate investment proposals: simple and compound interest, effective annual rates, present and future value, and the valuation of perpetuities and annuities, applied to problems like retirement planning.

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Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide (5th Edition)

Fridson and Alvarez teach financial statements from a skeptic's point of view, covering earnings quality, cash-flow statement analysis, ratio analysis, and a dedicated treatment of credit analysis and default risk. Its forensic approach suits credit work better than equity-focused texts. The 2022 fifth edition updates accounting standards and case examples.

Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (11th Edition)

The standard derivatives reference across trading desks and MFE programs. Covers forwards, futures, swaps, option pricing, the Greeks, volatility smiles, interest rate derivatives, and credit risk, using minimal stochastic calculus before introducing the Black-Scholes-Merton framework. The prerequisite layer for everything else in this topic: you cannot price a derivative with stochastic calculus until you know what the instruments are.

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies (8th Edition)

McKinsey's corporate-finance text, tying company value to return on invested capital and growth rather than to modelling mechanics. Covers reorganising financial statements into economic form, forecasting, cost of capital, and application to portfolio strategy and acquisitions.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

The foundational corporate finance text, updated 6th edition covering ESG-linked financing, the rise of private equity, and updated IFRS standards. Widely called 'the Bible of Corporate Finance' in European markets. This 6th edition was published in 2022 and is 1,040 pages long.

Corporate Finance

An MBA-level textbook building corporate finance from the law of one price: valuation, capital budgeting, cost of capital, capital structure, payout policy, options, and risk management. Includes worked examples and end-of-chapter problems throughout.

Principles of Corporate Finance

The standard MBA-level corporate finance textbook, covering present value, risk and return, capital budgeting, capital structure, dividend policy, and options. Readers finish able to value projects and firms and reason about financing decisions.

Fundamentals of Financial Management

An undergraduate textbook on financial management: working capital, time value of money, valuation, cost of capital, and short-term financing. Worked problems build the ability to analyze statements and make routine corporate funding decisions.

🌐Websites(13)

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Investopedia Corporate Finance

Reference entry defining the field, covering capital budgeting, capital structure, and working capital management, with links to related explainers. Gives quick plain-language definitions of terms you will meet repeatedly in finance textbooks, filings, and interview prep.

Damodaran Online

Aswath Damodaran's blog, where the NYU valuation professor works through live valuations of individual companies, market-wide questions, and corporate finance controversies. Reading it regularly shows how valuation judgment is applied to messy, current situations rather than textbook cases.

Corporate Finance Institute (CFI)

Commercial training provider whose public library holds free Excel templates, valuation and accounting explainers, and sample models alongside paid FMVA certification courses. The free material suits building practical modeling vocabulary; the certifications themselves require payment.

Aswath Damodaran's Website

Aswath Damodaran's NYU faculty page, hosting his lecture slides, webcasts, valuation spreadsheets, and annually updated datasets on equity risk premiums, betas, and cost of capital by industry. The data feeds real discounted cash flow work.

Khan Academy Finance

Khan Academy's free finance and capital markets course of short videos on interest and debt, housing, inflation, taxes, financial statements, stocks and bonds, retirement accounts, banking and derivatives. Gives beginners working intuition for everyday money decisions and how securities markets operate.

Bond Ratings, Default Spreads and the Cost of Debt (Damodaran Data)

Aswath Damodaran's freely published mapping from interest-coverage ratios to synthetic credit ratings and the corresponding default spreads, refreshed annually. The standard way to price an unrated issuer's credit risk and back out a cost of debt.

Damodaran Online: Current Valuation Data

Datasets Damodaran rebuilds every January from thousands of listed firms: country equity risk premiums, industry betas and costs of capital, operating margins, reinvestment rates, and trading multiples by sector and region.

Wall Street Oasis

The dominant free practitioner community with 1M+ members, extensive free content including financial modeling lessons, templates, and LBO/PE interview guides. Forums cover investment banking, private equity, and leveraged finance.

Chandoo.org: Master Excel for Financial Applications

A highly respected website offering extensive free tutorials, tips, and articles on advanced Excel techniques, charting, data analysis, and VBA, crucial for building robust financial models and dashboards.

Edwardbodmer.com

An unmatched free ecosystem in structured finance education, hosting dozens of downloadable Excel models for project finance and corporate finance, with embedded YouTube video walkthroughs. Features User-Defined Function (UDF) approach to resolving circular references. The site is active and regularly updated as of early 2026, with models covering solar, wind, thermal, hydro, toll roads, ports, airports, hotels, mining, oil, agriculture, PPPs, and manufacturing.

The Vernimmen.com Letter

A free monthly newsletter with over 60,000 subscribers, containing a conceptual article on a current topic, updated statistics, a research paper review, and a reader Q&A. All back issues except the two most recent are freely accessible. Active as of February 2026 (issue #170).

Vernimmen.com

The companion site to 'Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice,' providing free tools including financial data on 16,000+ companies, 300+ quiz questions, case studies, and a comprehensive glossary. The authors guarantee 72-hour email response times to reader questions. The site receives approximately 1,500 daily visitors.

CFA Institute

Official site of the body that sets and administers the CFA exams, publishing the curriculum topic areas and weights, exam policies, sample questions, the Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct, and research. Candidates use it to plan study against the tested content.

📄Papers(3)

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The Value of Synergy

Working paper separating operating from financial synergy, showing how to value each with explicit cash-flow assumptions, examining how synergy value is split between acquirer and target, and testing empirically how much synergy deals deliver versus how much is paid. Synergy is the word used to justify nearly every acquisition and almost never quantified. This paper forces the discipline: which cash flow line moves, when it moves, what discount rate applies, and who captures the value once a premium is paid.

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Structuring Aircraft Financing Transactions

A law firm primer on the structures used to fund commercial aircraft, including Japanese operating leases with call option, enhanced equipment trust certificates, export credit agency support, asset-backed securitization, and sukuk, with the tax and security considerations behind each.

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Ship Finance Basics

A maritime law firm's short PDF on how vessel lending works: typical loan and lease structures, ship mortgages and assignments of earnings and insurances as collateral, and the financial covenants — loan-to-value, minimum liquidity — lenders impose on owners.