The imperatives of modern business mean that, sooner or later, every executive will have to get to grips with finance. Its terms, its tools, its techniques. Corporate finance touches every aspect of your business: from deciding which capital expenditure projects are worthy of backing for tomorrow, to the immediate and daily challenge of managing business units for shareholder value. Finance is the framework for corporate decisions and the language of corporate decision-makers. Fluency in finance will serve you and your business well. The Handbook of Corporate Finance is the authoritative, comprehensive and crystal-clear companion to the everyday questions of business finance. In what projects will we best invest our shareholders money? How do we create and measure shareholder value? What type of finance should we raise? How can we measure and manage financial risk? These are challenges that every business faces, and questions that every executive will encounter. Knowing the answers to these questions will help you and your business to back the right choices, make the right decisions and deliver improved financial performance. These are the questions which The Handbook of Corporate Finance has been built to answer. Step-by-step, it will explain the principles and practices of corporate finance and the financial markets, with an emphasis on the terms you need to understand and the tools and techniques you need apply. Directed firmly at sounder judgment and sharper decision-making, it will guide you through key issues as it: * Provides a thorough grounding in value-based management; a frequently talked about but little understood concept. * Examines the essentials of mergers and acquisitions, and in particular, explore remedies for the problem of merger failure * Explores and explains the proper business use of derivatives as tools to help control risk, rather than increase it. * Introduces modern investment appraisal techniques, and contrast their application with frequently employed rules of thumb * Provides an overview of modern financial markets and instruments, with insights into the benefits brought by effective exploitation of those markets and perils of ignoring the needs of the finance providers The Handbook of Corporate Finance is here to help you to understand and apply the essentials of corporate finance with speed and confidence