📘 How do you work a finance case?

What you’ll learn

1. What a Finance Case Project Is — and How to Frame the DecisionDefine the finance case project as a decision, not a report, and learn to extract the central financial question, the stakeholder, and the labeled inputs before any modeling.A finance case project is an argument that recommends a specific financial decision. Harvard Business School writes each case as a 10–20 page document from a real person’s viewpoint that ends in a key decision. PACADI (Problem, Alternatives, Criteria, Analysis, Decision, Implementation), published by Harvard Business Publishing Education, keeps the analysis tethered to that choice. Pin the stakeholder first — firm cash at WACC, equity cash at the cost of equity — and label every input as fact, estimate, or assumption.
2. Reading the Numbers — Financial Statement and Ratio AnalysisDiagnose a company from the three working statements, a few targeted ratio families, and the DuPont identity, always against a named benchmark.The SEC lists four main statements; case work lives in the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. A profitable firm can still be cash-starved. Ratios answer four questions — liquidity, solvency, profitability, efficiency — and mean nothing without a time-series or peer benchmark. DuPont writes ROE as margin × turnover × equity multiplier; a rising multiplier is leverage, not an operating win. Common-size statements strip out scale so structure is visible.
3. Valuation and Capital Budgeting — Turning Numbers into a DecisionTurn diagnosis into a recommendation with a matched DCF, a documented WACC, NPV as the decision rule, and an honest terminal-value stress test.Damodaran estimates intrinsic value from cash flows, growth, and risk. Discount FCFF at WACC and FCFE at the cost of equity. WACC and terminal growth both sit in the Gordon-growth denominator, so they are the two inputs you stress together; Damodaran’s industry-average costs of capital are a sanity check, not a substitute for documenting the pieces. NPV is the rule (MIT 15.401 / Brealey, Myers, and Allen). IRR and payback are cross-checks with known traps. Terminal value is often half or more of enterprise value — Macabacus puts it around three-quarters in a five-year DCF — so disclose and stress it.
4. Build It — Assembling and Defending Your Finance Case ProjectAssemble framing, diagnosis, valuation, and sensitivity into a decision-first project a reviewer can break, and close with implementation plus the conditions that would reverse you.Lead with the recommendation. Separate color-coded inputs from formulas from outputs. Sensitivity moves one input; scenarios move several. Cut orphan ratios that never enter the argument. Close with labeled assumptions, principal risks, an implementation path, and what would change your mind. Tonight: open a 10-K and write the decision sentence.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• The Case Method — Harvard Business School — https://www.hbs.edu/mba/academic-experience/the-case-method
• A Framework for Using Cases to Help Students Become Better Decision Makers (PACADI) — Harvard Business Publishing Education — https://hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds/a-framework-for-using-cases-to-help-students-become-better-decision-makers
• Beginners’ Guide to Financial Statements — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — https://www.sec.gov/about/reports-publications/investorpubsbegfinstmtguide
• Intrinsic vs Relative Value — Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern — https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/littlebook/intrinsicvsrelative.htm
• Cost of Equity and Capital (US) — Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern — https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/wacc.html
• 15.401 Finance Theory I — Capital Budgeting (NPV, IRR, payback) — MIT OpenCourseWare — https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-2008/resources/capital-budgeting/

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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