Fundamentals of Corporate Finance 10th Edition by Richard Brealey
By: Richard Brealey
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Print ISBN: 9781260013962, 1260013960
eText ISBN: 9781260703931, 1260703932
Edition: 10th
Copyright year: 2020
This book is an introduction to corporate finance. It focuses on how companies invest
in real assets, how they raise the money to pay for the investments, and how those
assets ultimately affect the value of the firm. It also provides a broad overview of the
financial landscape, discussing, for example, the major players in financial markets,
the role of financial institutions in the economy, and how securities are traded and
valued by investors. The book offers a framework for systematically thinking about
most of the important financial problems that both firms and individuals are likely to
confront.
Financial management is important, interesting, and challenging. It is important
because today?s capital investment decisions may determine the businesses that the
firm is in 10, 20, or more years ahead. Needless to say, a firm?s success or failure
also depends, in large part, on its ability to find the capital that it requires.
Finance is interesting for several reasons. Financial decisions often involve huge
sums of money. Large investment projects or acquisitions may involve billions of dollars.
Also, the financial community is international and fast-moving, with colorful
heroes and a sprinkling of unpleasant villains.
Finance is challenging. Financial decisions are rarely cut and dried, and the financial
markets in which companies operate are changing rapidly. Good managers can
cope with routine problems, but only the best managers can respond to change. To
handle new problems, you need more than rules of thumb; you need to understand
why companies and financial markets behave as they do and when common practice
may not be best practice. Once you have a consistent framework for making financial
decisions, complex problems become more manageable.
This book provides that framework. It is not an encyclopedia of finance. It
focuses instead on setting out the basic principles of financial management and
applying them to the main decisions faced by the financial manager. It explains
how managers can make choices between investments that may pay off at different
points of time or have different degrees of risk. It also describes the main features
of financial markets and discusses why companies may prefer a particular source
of finance.
