Business Finance

FIN 3403, Instructor: Dr. Anthony Byrd

Instructor Introduction

Select and view the content below for more information about FIN 3403.

Greetings, finance students!!

Welcome to FIN 3403! Most of you have probably already had at least one course through Webcourses, which uses the Canvas course management system. However, if you’re new to UCF and you haven’t used Webcourses yet, don’t worry. All of the information you need will be right here in the "Home" section, and you can see how this course is organized by clicking on "Course Schedule" above.

FIN 3403 will be carefully organized by week, to ensure that everything you need is easy to find. You will find documents to read, assignments to work through, links to online articles, and short videos. We hope that you will find the course interesting and easy to follow with your computer, tablet, or phone.

Our course format also includes several on-campus, face-to-face meetings during the semester. These will be very helpful! We will use this time to help students understand the more difficult concepts and techniques in the course with a variety of teamwork assignments. This hands-on approach is very effective!

You’ll also have online quizzes available. You can find the quizzes also by clicking "Assignments" above. You will be able to take these as many times as you want, and your highest grade will be recorded.

FINANCE HELP DESK

You will have a lot of help with FIN 3403. We will have several graduate teaching assistants available for you in our Finance Help Desk in BA1, room 456. Help Desk office hours are posted at the top of this page next to my photo. I encourage you to take advantage of this service. It's free tutoring! This semester, we have teaching assistants who are master’s students in accounting, and doctoral students in finance. They are excellent at helping students learn the principles and techniques that we will cover during the semester.

What stuff do I need for FIN 3403?

The official text for this course is Foundations of Finance, 10th edition, by Keown, Martin and Petty (Pearson Education).

Acceptable options are “Foundations of Finance,” 9^th edition, by Keown, Martin and Petty (below, left), or the 8^th edition (below, right). You can probably go online and find one of these for a really good price.

I created a note guide (below) for the course also. The guide contains the PowerPoint presentations, articles from the Wall Street Journal and other financial publications, problem sets that we will cover during the semester, and some practice exam questions from old exams. This book is optional – all of the material will be available to students in Webcourses. Some students just like to have everything bound together in a book. Others prefer to print the documents out themselves. Book royalties go to the UCF Foundation.

You will need a financial calculator. No large-screen programmable calculators or smart phones will be allowed in the testing centers. We just want everything to be fair and no students should have a technology advantage over others. So, we highly recommend the Hewlett-Packard 10BII+. It costs about $30 and has all of the functions that you need. Another reasonable choice is the Texas Instruments BA 2 plus, but we recommend the HP. Our teaching assistants will know how to work the HP calculator, but they may not be familiar with other brands. Also, the slides in the course will show calculator steps using the HP10BII+. It’s very easy to use!

I do not require My Finance Lab, so no access codes will be needed.