The analysis of finance starts from the analysis of opportunity cost for the price decision making, these opportunity costs include interest, risk of yield fluctuations, liquidity, information asymmetry and other transaction costs. And all these opportunity costs are integrated into an uniform time-interest model after be converted into a discounting rate.
The critical part of these knowledge is the relationship among Value-Risk-Market. There are three major difficulties within this relationship:
- Understanding the nature of risk and uncertainty, and how to valuing the risk and uncertainty.
- Designing the financial products to manage the risk, especially the design of derives.
- Understanding the nature of market as a complex system.
Many branches stands on the general ground of understanding the big picture:
- Financial economics is the foundation of all the financial disciplines, which focuses on the models used in finance. The most important models includes CAPM, APT and S-L option pricing model.
- Finance engineering is the direct application of the financial economics, and it focuses on the risk management.
- Investment focus on capital management and capital management, and also studies the general mechanism of the market.
- Corporate finance link the finance and the business, a part of which, the financial statement analysis, focuses on the valuing of the corporate and business, and has strong relation to Accounting knowledge.
- Financial firms are intermediates in the financial markets, which have special business logic and require special corporate governance approach.
