Finance and Investing

Distinguish stocks, bonds, cash equivalents, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds by their ownership claims, cash flows, and principal risks.

Price a plain fixed-rate bond by discounting its remaining coupon and principal payments.

Explain how a change in market interest rates affects a fixed-rate bond’s price and yield.

Interpret the price, volume, bid, ask, and spread shown in a U.S. security quote.

Select a market or limit order for a given trading scenario and calculate the resulting transaction cost.

Show how a basic business transaction changes the accounting equation.

Identify revenue, expenses, and profit measures on an income statement.

Identify operating assets, financial obligations, and shareholders’ equity on a balance sheet.

Classify cash flows as operating, investing, or financing activities on a cash-flow statement.

Calculate and interpret gross margin, operating margin, current ratio, debt-to-equity ratio, and return on equity from supplied statements.

Map a public company’s business model into its principal revenue sources, costs, and value drivers.

Calculate earnings per share and the price-to-earnings ratio from supplied company data.

Calculate free cash flow from operating cash flow and capital expenditures.

Create a simple revenue and operating-profit forecast using explicit assumptions.

Estimate a terminal value using the constant-growth model.

Estimate an intrinsic value per share by discounting forecast free cash flows and terminal value.

Calculate a portfolio’s expected return from asset weights and expected asset returns.

Calculate the historical volatility of an investment from a supplied return series.

Interpret correlation and explain its effect on portfolio diversification.

Construct a basic stock-bond-cash allocation for a stated objective, horizon, liquidity need, and risk capacity.

Execute a threshold-based portfolio rebalance using current and target weights.

Compare a portfolio’s return with an appropriate benchmark after investment fees.

Retrieve a U.S. public company’s 10-K, 10-Q, and material 8-K filings from SEC EDGAR.

Write a concise investment memo stating a thesis, supporting evidence, valuation, key risks, and conditions that would invalidate the thesis.

Compare a taxable brokerage account, traditional IRA, Roth IRA, and 401(k) by tax treatment, access rules, and typical professional use cases.

Apply a pre-investment due-diligence checklist to identify behavioral bias, conflicts of interest, unsupported claims, and common fraud warning signs.