Analyze four leading financial ratios and how each would affect investment strategies and a decision for a medium-sized private company to go public or stay private. Evaluate the application of each of the four financial ratios to a selected medium-sized private company based on comparable or benchmark industry ratios.

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Week 2 Assignment: Investment Strategies

For this assignment you will select a medium-sized private company and one that allows access to its financial statements. You will create investment strategies for this company based on a financial analysis of investment strategies applied in other companies and determine whether the company should stay private or go public. The decision will be based on how the company compares to other companies in the same industry. You will research industry best practices and selected ratios relevant to the organization. This research will inform the decision to remain private or go public and allow you to develop an argument based on your recommendation. Your argument will be based on information from the company’s financial statements compared to both industry averages and to at least one benchmark company. Before developing your recommendation and an argument for a determination, review the guidelines and regulations associated with going public by reading Information for Small Businesses.

Instructions

Write a 4–5 page paper in which you:

–Describe a selected medium-sized private company, its operations, and its associated industry and evaluate these areas to determine whether the company should be publicly traded or not.

You need access to the financial statements of the selected company to complete this assessment.

-Analyze four leading financial ratios and how each would affect investment strategies and a decision for a medium-sized private company to go public or stay private.
-Evaluate the application of each of the four financial ratios to a selected medium-sized private company based on comparable or benchmark industry ratios.

Recommend the application of one of the four financial ratios to a selected medium-sized private company to inform a decision to go public or stay private supported with a justification for the recommendation.

-Provide at least four reliable, relevant, peer-reviewed references, published within the last five years that support the paper’s claims.

From your prior experience and study, what has stimulated you to wish to continue your education at the PhD level? Why do you believe that a course of study at the PhD level is the appropriate goal for your future work?

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Interesting Topics under The Corporate Governance

Writing a Research Proposal for a PhD Application

 (We expect a proposal to be of 8-10 pages in length, plus bibliography.)

In recent years we have received a number of enquiries about how to prepare a research proposal for application to our PhD courses. The following notes are meant to suggest some of the considerations and issues to take into account in preparing this part of the application.

  1. We are interested in how and why the student has come to be interested in postgraduate study at the PhD level. This encompasses two questions:
  • From your prior experience and study, what has stimulated you to wish to continue your education at the PhD level?
  • Why do you believe that a course of study at the PhD level is the appropriate goal for your future work?

Answers to the latter question might range from an interest in a deeper understanding of particular intellectual issues that the applicant wishes to study to the requirement of a PhD to engage in particular careers in university, government or industry.

  1. The applicant should identify the research topic that they wish to study, indicating why they believe deeper knowledge about this topic is needed. This often involves identifying key articles or books from the scholarly literature that has stimulated their interest, the questions that have not been answered by this literature and/or why the existing literature provides a misleading or incorrect understanding.
  2. The applicant should provide some description of the research methods that they intend to employ in addressing their research topic. However, it is important not to become too concerned at this stage about the depth or specificity of the proposal with respect to research method. Much of the first year is engaged in refining and developing the research method. Nonetheless, it is useful to know whether the applicant is proposing to examine the research topic through theoretical or empirical methods and, if the latter, the types of qualitative or quantitative information that might be examined and how this might be assembled. In the past, some proposals have been so general or broad that there were concerns about whether they could be undertaken by a single researcher in a lifetime rather than in the 3-4 years of a PhD research project.
  3. It does not disadvantage an applicant to admit that they believe they may need further training or reading in particular areas. On the contrary, it often increases our confidence in the maturity of the applicant that they are able to identify the limitations of their prior training.
  4. Many applicants find that reviewing the work of departmental researchers provides them with a better idea of the type of work that is done at the University of Sussex and often provides some specific guidance about who might be a suitable supervisor. It is not essential, however, for an applicant to identify a particular supervisor and an applicant should not be discouraged if they do not find a current researcher that closely shares their interests. Many researchers have a much broader range of experience and knowledge than is reflected in their publication record or their website.

In your initial post, defend your position on batch size and tell whether Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) is relevant to your selected company/industry. Identify how metrics are used in the company/industry to support use of batch size or EOQ. Enter your company’s story along with narrative and relevant metrics in the initial post of the Discussion Forum.

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MBA 515 Unit 5 Discussion

Economic order quantity (EOQ) is the ideal order quantity a company should purchase for its inventory given a set cost of production, a certain demand rate, and other variables. This is done to minimize inventory holding costs and order-related costs.

The Following excerpt is taken from How to make EOQ Relevant Again (Links to an external site.) (2012).

y-axis is cost. x-axis is order quantity. EOQ is in the middle where inventory carrying costs and acquisition cost per order meet

EOQ will increase as the annual demand and the cost of ordering increase and it will decrease as the cost of carrying inventory and the

The concepts of Just-in-Time (JIT) and Lean have led many to question the continued relevance of Economic Order Quantity (EOQ), whose function is to identify the optimum order with the lowest cost parameter.

In response, yes, it is still valid as a basic analytic tool, however, many supply chain industry executives perceive it as irrelevant. Many companies cannot apply it—even if they wanted to—because they do not know their acquisition costs to place an order or their yearly inventory carrying cost rate.

EOQ is used despite its highly restrictive assumptions that: demand is relatively constant and is known or predictable; the item is purchased in lots or batches and not continuously; the order and preparation costs (acquisition or purchase cost per order) and the inventory carrying costs are constant and known; and replacement of inventory occurs all at once. And knowing how to apply EOQ practically is just as important as being able to use the formula calculation itself.

Determine your metrics

EOQ involves determining the optimal quantity to purchase when orders are placed. For example, small orders result in low inventory levels and inventory carrying costs, frequent orders and higher ordering costs; while large orders result in higher inventory levels and inventory carrying costs and infrequent orders and lower ordering costs.

Alarmingly, many companies have never determined their cost of placing and processing a single purchase order (e.g., the time and extra cost to send in an order for an item, receive it, handle the supplier’s invoice and pay for it). This cost of placing and processing a single paper-based purchase order (PO) is often substantial—in the range of $35 to $200 per PO. The cost impact of placing and processing a single PO in many instances is further aggravated by the higher receipt handling processing and inbound freight charges that may incur for smaller and more frequently delivered orders. Worse yet is that some companies only use the holding cost as the extra cost of money invested in stock rather than an inventory carrying cost (ICC) rate. Normally, the holding cost portion is the actual out-of-pocket expense for money borrowed from a bank or interest which varies with the prime borrowing rate. For others, the holding cost may constitute the imputed “opportunity cost” on the use of equity capital earned by investing it in a high yielding security.

In your initial post, defend your position on batch size and tell whether Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) is relevant to your selected company/industry. Identify how metrics are used in the company/industry to support use of batch size or EOQ. Enter your company’s story along with narrative and relevant metrics in the initial post of the Discussion Forum.

Produce histograms and descriptive statistics. Conduct statistical analysis in Excel to examine what factors can be related to firm profitability. Produce scatter plots to graphically examine the relationship between the variables. Perform Correlation Analysis to check whether there is linear association between your chosen profitability ratio and each of the other two variables.

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Quantitative Analysis

Assessment brief

 
You are required to produce an individual report based on your independent work. You first need to conduct several tasks using the Fame financial database and Microsoft Excel. You are then required to produce a report based around the discussion of the main results from the conducted analysis. Your work must be fully referenced using the Harvard referencing style.  Electronic submission of the completed individual report must be made via Canvas. Online sources such as Wikipedia and Investopedia must not be used as references. The word count excludes references.

The purpose of this report is to analyse firm financial characteristics and examine the determinants of firm profitability.  To do this, you are required to select a sample of 50 non-financial firms listed on the FTSE 350 Index of the London Stock Exchange and collect data that represent firm financial characteristics. The data should be collected for the year 2020.

 

Tasks to be performed using Fame and Microsoft Excel include the following:

1.     Select a sample of firms using an appropriate sampling method in statistics. The sample of firms and their data should be gathered from FAME Database that contains data for UK and Irish publicly listed companies. All your selected companies should be firms in FTSE 350 Index and should exclude firms in the financial sector (such as banks and insurance companies. These can be found under BvD Sectors: 32 – Banking, Insurance & Financial Services).

 

Note that the sample should be collected by each of you individually to avoid any potential collusion.

2.     Collect the following data for your sample of companies for the year 2020:

 

1)     Company Name

2)     BvD Sector – sector a company operates in

3)     One Measure of Firm Profitability ONLY. You need to select either Return on Total Assets (ROA) or Return on Capital Employed (ROCE), Return on Shareholder Funds/Equity (ROE) or Profit Margin.

4)     Any other TWO of the following variables ONLY:

 

–       Total Assets for 2020 (to measure of Firm Size)

–       Turnover in 2020, Turnover in 2019 (to measure of Firm (Sales) Growth)

–       Current Assets, Stock & WIP, Current Liabilities – all for 2020 (to measure Liquidity)

–       Long-Term Debt, Current Liabilities, Total Assets – all for 2020 (to measure Financial Leverage)

 

You should have three variables in total, i.e., one measure of profitability and two other variables. Please ensure that all of your 50 firms have data available for all three of your chosen variables.

 

3.     Export the data you collected from Fame into Microsoft Excel

4.     Perform the following transformations/calculations of your data in Excel.

–       Firm Size = Natural Log of Total Assets

–       Sales Growth = (Turnover2020 – Turnover2019)/ Turnover2019 *100

–       Liquidity (Acid Test Ratio) = (Current Assets – Stock & WIP)/Current Liabilities

–       Leverage (Debt Ratio) = (Long-Term Debt + Current Liabilities)/Total Assets*100

 

5.     Produce histograms and descriptive statistics (min/max, mean/median, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) for profitability and the other two variables you have selected (Note that if you selected firm size, then it is advisable to produce statistics for both Total Assets and LN of Assets). Use descriptive statistics to identify outlying observations and make appropriate adjustments to your variables to ensure that there are no extreme outliers.

 

6.     Conduct statistical analysis in Excel to examine what factors can be related to firm profitability.

a)     Produce scatter plots to graphically examine the relationship between the variables.

b)    Perform Correlation Analysis to check whether there is linear association between your chosen profitability ratio and each of the other two variables. Use correlation table to check whether there is any potential problem of multicollinearity (this is especially important if you conduct multiple regression analysis).

c)     Perform either Simple Linear Regression or Multiple Linear Regression Analysis to examine factors that can be related to firm profitability. You should also conduct hypothesis testing in this section.

 

7.     Produce a Report in Microsoft Word based on the discussion of the results from your statistical analysis (see below for details).

 

 Your report should contain the following:

a)     Introduction, where you specify the aim of the report, variables you selected and the main methods of analysis.

b)    Explanation of the process of sample selection with reference to an appropriate sampling method.

c)     Outline of the variables you have selected.

d)    Discussion of the main statistics for your variables from histograms and descriptive statistics (min/max, mean/median, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis), including comments on the distribution of each variable. This section should also include an explanation and justification of the adjustments made to your variables (e.g., outliers or natural logarithm).

e)     Discussion of the results from scatterplots and correlation analysis (direction and strength of the relationship).

f)     Discussion of the results from either simple or multiple regression analysis (coefficients and their p-values; results from the overall model such as R2 and Adjusted R2, F stats for multiple regression). You should discuss results from the hypothesis testing in order to identify whether there is any statistically significant relationship between the variables. In this section, you should also provide a discussion of your results in relation to the findings in the previous literature.

g)    Discussion of the main limitations of your study and recommendations for further research.

h)     Conclusion of the report where you provide a summary of the key findings from your analysis.

 

NOTE: You are required to submit the data that you collected and the graphs and tables you produced in EXCEL on Canvas.

 

Can organizational culture impact ethical behavior? What do employers owe their employees? Is there a disconnect between the concerns of employees and their management? What creates this difference? Identify a personal experience where you were impacted by leadership choices. What happened? What was the impact on you and on the organization? How will you implement the lessons learned in this module within your professional career?

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What do employers owe employees?

Craft a reflection paper focused on the idea that ethical leadership in the workplace is most effectively instituted when it is modeled by senior leadership. In this paper, you will want to reflect on how the choices of leadership impact the employees of an organization. Can organizational culture impact ethical behavior? What do employers owe their employees? Is there a disconnect between the concerns of employees and their management? What creates this difference? Identify a personal experience where you were impacted by leadership choices. What happened? What was the impact on you and on the organization? How will you implement the lessons learned in this module within your professional career?

From your prior experience and study, what has stimulated you to wish to continue your education at the PhD level? Why do you believe that a course of study at the PhD level is the appropriate goal for your future work?

/in /by

Interesting Topics under The Corporate Governance

Writing a Research Proposal for a PhD Application

 (We expect a proposal to be of 8-10 pages in length, plus bibliography.)

In recent years we have received a number of enquiries about how to prepare a research proposal for application to our PhD courses. The following notes are meant to suggest some of the considerations and issues to take into account in preparing this part of the application.

  1. We are interested in how and why the student has come to be interested in postgraduate study at the PhD level. This encompasses two questions:
  • From your prior experience and study, what has stimulated you to wish to continue your education at the PhD level?
  • Why do you believe that a course of study at the PhD level is the appropriate goal for your future work?

Answers to the latter question might range from an interest in a deeper understanding of particular intellectual issues that the applicant wishes to study to the requirement of a PhD to engage in particular careers in university, government or industry.

  1. The applicant should identify the research topic that they wish to study, indicating why they believe deeper knowledge about this topic is needed. This often involves identifying key articles or books from the scholarly literature that has stimulated their interest, the questions that have not been answered by this literature and/or why the existing literature provides a misleading or incorrect understanding.
  2. The applicant should provide some description of the research methods that they intend to employ in addressing their research topic. However, it is important not to become too concerned at this stage about the depth or specificity of the proposal with respect to research method. Much of the first year is engaged in refining and developing the research method. Nonetheless, it is useful to know whether the applicant is proposing to examine the research topic through theoretical or empirical methods and, if the latter, the types of qualitative or quantitative information that might be examined and how this might be assembled. In the past, some proposals have been so general or broad that there were concerns about whether they could be undertaken by a single researcher in a lifetime rather than in the 3-4 years of a PhD research project.
  3. It does not disadvantage an applicant to admit that they believe they may need further training or reading in particular areas. On the contrary, it often increases our confidence in the maturity of the applicant that they are able to identify the limitations of their prior training.
  4. Many applicants find that reviewing the work of departmental researchers provides them with a better idea of the type of work that is done at the University of Sussex and often provides some specific guidance about who might be a suitable supervisor. It is not essential, however, for an applicant to identify a particular supervisor and an applicant should not be discouraged if they do not find a current researcher that closely shares their interests. Many researchers have a much broader range of experience and knowledge than is reflected in their publication record or their website.

What is the future of the workplace in 2040 and what are the challenges that professionals must address? What are possible scenarios and solutions?

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The future of the workplace from the perspective of Managerial Accounting

What is the future of the workplace in 2040 and what are the challenges that professionals must address? What are possible scenarios and solutions?

Research and discuss how the SEC’s EDGAR | Search Tools improves how investors find and use financial information. In your paper, Explain how investors can use the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) database at EDGAR | Search Tools (Links to an external site.) to research a company’s operations and financial information.

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SEC Filings and the EDGAR Database

Research and discuss how the SEC’s EDGAR | Search Tools improves how investors find and use financial information. In your paper,

Explain how investors can use the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) database at EDGAR | Search Tools (Links to an external site.) to research a company’s operations and financial information.

Assess the financial performance of Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) by determining the risk of investing in the company through financial statement analysis. To make the above assessment and determination, go to Amazon’s.com (Links to an external site.) official website, and locate the company’s Investor Relations link. Using the Investors Relations link, find financial information such as SEC Filings and Annual Reports.

Conclude how investors can assess Amazon’s.com financial performance and risk using Annual Reports.
Explain the content of each report listed below in detail and how it relates to your assessment of Amazon’s.com financial performance.

Form 10-K SEC filings
Annual Reports
Management Discussion and Analysis
Management’s Responsibility for Financial Reporting
Management’s Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting
Auditors’ Report
Selected Financial Data

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) is the world’s largest electronic commerce and cloud computing company measured by revenue and market capitalization. The following items were adapted from a recent Annual Report of Amazon.com (Links to an external site.) for the year ending December 31:
In millions

  • 1. Accounts payable    $16,459
  • 2. Accounts receivable   5,612
  • 3. Cash   14,557
  • 4. Cost of sales  62,752
  • 5. Income tax expense   167
  • 6. Interest expense 210
  • 7. Inventories   8,299
  • 8. Net cash provided by operating activities   6,842
  • 9. Net cash flows used for investing activities    (5,065)
  • 10. Net sales  88,988
  • 11. Other expense   118
  • 12. Other income   76
  • 13. Property, plant, and other long-term assets   16,967
  • 14. Selling, general, and administrative expenses  26,058
  • 15. Retained earnings (Dec. 31)    2,190

Indicate on which financial statement you would find each of the preceding items using the following notations (note: an item may appear on more than one statement):
IS Income statement
SE Statement of stockholders’ equity
BS Balance sheet
SCF Statement of cash flow

Prepare an income statement for the year ending December 31, based on the com, Inc. financial statement data shown above.

Write an essay about something you’ve done — academically or personally — and what you’ve learned from it. Was it a success or a challenge? Did it represent a turning point in your life? How did this particular moment in your life influence you, and how will it continue to influence you as you pursue your college education?

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UW Whitewater Accounting Application Essay

This part is all about you. Tell us about something you’ve done — academically or personally — and what you’ve learned from it. Was it a success or a challenge? Did it represent a turning point in your life? How did this particular moment in your life influence you, and how will it continue to influence you as you pursue your college education?

What should be included in this essay:

  • Any academic and personal hurdles and/or challenges you’d like us to know about in the context of your application
  • Any information that is inclusive of your family or your community experiences

Can organizational culture impact ethical behavior? What do employers owe their employees? Is there a disconnect between the concerns of employees and their management? What creates this difference? Identify a personal experience where you were impacted by leadership choices. What happened? What was the impact on you and on the organization? How will you implement the lessons learned in this module within your professional career?

/in /by

What do employers owe employees?

Craft a reflection paper focused on the idea that ethical leadership in the workplace is most effectively instituted when it is modeled by senior leadership. In this paper, you will want to reflect on how the choices of leadership impact the employees of an organization. Can organizational culture impact ethical behavior? What do employers owe their employees? Is there a disconnect between the concerns of employees and their management? What creates this difference? Identify a personal experience where you were impacted by leadership choices. What happened? What was the impact on you and on the organization? How will you implement the lessons learned in this module within your professional career?