FIT5159 IT for financial decisions - Semester 2, 2013

This unit provides students with an understanding of the development and use of IT tools and techniques for modelling and decision support in the field of finance. The unit is designed to give students a broad understanding of the financial subsystems confronting business enterprises. The main focus, besides the traditional modelling of finance decision making process using spreadsheet tools, will be IT tools and related techniques that can aid in the analysis and interpretation of real financial problems confronting an enterprise. This unit will look at business related financial issues in the context of specific case studies.

Mode of Delivery

Contact Hours

2 hrs lectures/wk, 2 hrs laboratory/wk

Workload requirements

Students will be expected to spend a total of 12 hours per week during semester on this unit as follows:

For on-campus students:

• Lectures: 2 hours per week
• Tutorials/Lab Sessions: 2 hours per week per tutorial
• and up to an additional 8 hours in some weeks for completing lab and project work, private study and revision.

Unit Relationships

Prohibitions

BUS5030

Prerequisites

FIT9004 or FIT9017 or CSE9000 or BUS9520
Basic descriptive and inferential statistics, some financial accounting and basic business finance knowledge.

Chief Examiner

Campus Lecturer

Tutors

Academic Overview

Learning Outcomes

• understand the core foundations of finance, as appropriate to key financial analysis and decision making;
• understand the core technologies that support financial analysis and decision making;
• understand quantitative techniques supporting financial analysis and decision making;
• be able to apply the technologies and techniques studied to solving financial issues;
• be able to analyse financial solution requirements and select appropriate technical and quantitative decision aids;
• be able to interpret outputs from quantitative and technology based finance tools to aid in decision making.

Unit Schedule

*Unit Schedule details will be maintained and communicated to you via your learning system.

Assessment Summary

Examination (3 hours): 60%; In-semester assessment: 40%

Teaching Approach

Assessment Requirements

Assessment Policy

Faculty Policy - Unit Assessment Hurdles (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/resources/staff/edgov/policies/assessment-examinations/unit-assessment-hurdles.html)

Academic Integrity - Please see the Demystifying Citing and Referencing tutorial at http://lib.monash.edu/tutorials/citing/

Assessment Tasks

Participation

Tutorial Participation will attract a 5% weighting towards the overall unit grade.

• Assessment task 1

  Title:

  Assignment 1 - Assessment of financial health with spreadsheet tool

  Description:

  This is an individual assignment. Students are required to download from the annual report of a set of selected firm in a given industry. Students will learn how financial ratios given in the financial statement in a firm's annual report are computed and should be interpreted based on the text information given in the annual reports. The deliverables include a report with a spreadsheet model (Microsoft Excel).

  Weighting:

  15%

  Criteria for assessment:

  A written report discussing the questions to be answered which will be assessed based on:

  • Working demonstration of the spreadsheet/mathematical model (30%);
  • Interpretation of the numerical results and sensitivity analysis (40%);
  • Software system and financial model flexibilility (ease of use, etc) (30%).

  Due date:

  Friday 6 September 2013, 4pm

  Remarks:

  Upload Assignment 1 with signed assignment coversheet of FIT assignment coversheet to FIT5159 - unit Moodle Assignment 1 submission site. 

• Assessment task 2

  Title:

  Assignment 2 - Finanical Investment Analysis using AHP based Expert Choice 11.5 software

  Description:

  This assignment will teach students how to design an empirical test of a "Decision Support System”, based on AHP framework, which can be used for the selection of stocks (financial assets) and the associated investment decision analysis. At the completion of this assignment, students should be able to:

  • Innovatively use Expert Choice 11.5 software for designing a decision support system of financial decision analysis.
  • Formulate the stock selection and investment analysis problem for a given industry in competitive financial capital markets.
  • Demonstrate on the use of financial analytics and the choice of associated criteria and justifications.

  • Preparation of a group report using the following headings:

  1.  Introduction (background and motivation).
  2.  Stock selection problem formulation using AHP framework.
  3.  Using Expert Choice software to establish the goals, sub-goals, weights for each intrinsic, extrinsic, and criteria and relative priorities.

  • Demonstrate the understanding of the limitations of AHP and the need to represent investment criteria using fuzzy logic and Analytic Network processing framework where applicable.

  Scope:
  
  Each group of students is to apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based decision support system to explore investor behaviour, extrinsic and intrinsic factors in the evaluation, and selection and ranking of three or four listed alternative stocks in ASX for one of five industries:

  1. Telecommunication
  2. Mining
  3. Retail
  4. Energy, oil and gas
  5. Property

  The evaluation framework facilitates the selection of stock/firm and their investment analysis using multi-criterion decision-making criteria discussed in lectures 6 to 8. The pair-wise comparison procedure should be based on appropriate criteria (at least two criteria for each class of investor behaviour/objectives, intrinsic and extrinsic factors).
  
  The framework captures individual behaviour and perceptions in a changing environment, in the form of judgments of investment criteria and stock alternatives arising from experience. The present perceptive and intuitive evaluation approach has managerial implications because it represents a useful addition to asset selection and investment analysis.
  
  The deliverable will be a group report comprising information that complies with the assessment criteria stated.

  Weighting:

  20%

  Criteria for assessment:

  This group assignment will be graded according to the following criteria:

  • Introduction and related literature review (20%)
  • Technical content (calculation and criteria selection; hierarchy construction, priorities ranking, consistency verification, result tables and graphs) (30%)
  • Results discussion (justifications of results reported in tables and graphs in figures) (30%)
  • References (at least 6 to 10 related published papers/technical reports must be read and cited) (10%)
  • Conclusion and articulation of issues for follow up investigation (10%)

  Students must indicate their % contribution to the group work. This will be used to adjust individual student marks if necessary.

  Due date:

  Friday 18 October 2013, 4pm

• Assessment task 3

  Title:

  Continual assessment during tutorial Participation

  Description:

  Weekly class exercises and discussions in tutorials.

  Weighting:

  5%

  Criteria for assessment:

  • Participation in tutorials
  • Completion of class exercises
  • Contribution to class discussions

  Hurdle requirements:

  Standard Faculty of IT hurdle requirements for postgraduate unit policy applies.

  Due date:

  Weekly (starting Week 2)

Examinations

• Examination 1

  Weighting:

  60 %

  Length:

  3 hours

  Type (open/closed book):

  Closed book

  Electronic devices allowed in the exam:

  Scientific and/or financial calculators without prior programming. 

  Remarks:

  Multiple choice questions plus computation and discussion questions. All materials (tutorials, readings, lecture notes/slides) are examinable.

Learning resources

Feedback to you

• Informal feedback on progress in labs/tutes
• Graded assignments with comments
• Interviews
• Quiz results
• Solutions to tutes, labs and assignments

Extensions and penalties

Returning assignments

Resubmission of assignments

Unless otherwise special permission is granted by the Lecturer, no resubmission after due date will be granted.

Referencing requirements

Please refer to the Library Guides for Citing and Referencing at http://guides.lib.monash.edu/content.php?pid=88267&sid=656564

Assignment submission

Online submission

If Electronic Submission has been approved for your unit, please submit your work via the learning system for this unit, which you can access via links in the my.monash portal.

Recommended text(s)

Brigham, E. F. & Houston, J. F. (2012). Fundamentals of Financial Management. (7th Edition) South-Western.

Examination material or equipment

Scientific and/or financial calculators without prior programming. 

Other Information

Policies

Graduate Attributes Policy

Student services

Monash University Library

Disability Liaison Unit

Your feedback to Us

Previous Student Evaluations of this Unit

Changes to assignment tasks have been introduced in accordance with student feedback.

Other

All reading materials, lecture slides and tutorial/assignment notes other than textbook chapters will be posted on the FIT5159-S2_2013 unit Moodle website prior to each week's lecture. Students are requested to do prior readings before the classes.