For your assignment, you are asked to build a simplified financial model of a real firm and describe its financial policies, structure and performance. You are then asked to critically discuss and comment on the above, for instance by comparing the firm to its peers or the overall market. What does this mean in practice?

1. Identify a firm following the instructions below.

2. Download its financial statements and share price history.

3. Construct simplified financial statements

How to identify a firm The firm should be publicly listed with a sufficient (at least three years) history of financial statements available. To select the firm, you need to refer to your initials and find the closest possible match to a ticker symbol. E.g., if Galileo Galilei was a student in our class, he would look for a company with ticker symbol closest to GG, which happens to be the symbol of the NYSE-listed firm Goldcorp. However, if that symbol was not in use or the company did not have a sufficient history of data available, then he could also include his middle initials VB and look for anything close to GVBG. In this case, he may settle on GV, which is the symbol for the American Stock Exchange listed Goldfield Corporation. If none of these were available, he might try GF or GH, and so on, to stay as close as possible to his initials.