 Dear students and learners, I welcome you all to the course of Strategic Finance. This is an advanced level course in the domain of Finance. Let's see how this course has to offer you in the days to come. If we talk about the course overview, the course will emphasize on financial aspects of managerial decision making undertaken by corporate managers with the objective of value creation for the shareholders of the corporations. This course will give you an understanding of finance theory and its practical application in real world phenomena. This course covers major topics such as corporate governance, financial statement analysis, valuation of real and financial assets, risk management and derivatives, trade-off between risk and return for the purpose of determining efficient portfolios, capital structure and dividend policy, cost of capital and project evaluation, working capital management and takeovers, mergers and acquisition transactions. If we talk about the learning objectives intended with this course, we expect that the students will be able to learn in this course the essentials of finance theories, financial analysis and financial forecasting corporate governance, performance management, discounted cash flow analysis for project evaluation, decisions related to corporate financing and dividend policy, risk return analysis for portfolio management, securities valuation principles and practices, derivatives and risk management, evolution of financial mergers and acquisitions and working capital management. After completing this course, you will be able to apply principles of finance theory to solve financial problems at the firm level. You will be able to undertake financial analysis for financial forecasting and modeling. You will be able to manage your performance at the corporate level. You will be able to determine the risk return for determining efficient portfolios while developing portfolios. You will be able to do independently the capital budgeting practices. This course will able to determine relevance of information efficiency in the capital markets. You will be able to value securities like shares and bonds. You will be able to determine optimal capital structure. You will be able to go for working capital management practices and this course will able to go for evaluating mergers and acquisitions transactions. The core learning text will be the corporate finance by Rose Westerfield and Jeffy. I have used the 11th edition. If there is any other latest edition available with you, you can go for that edition at your convenience. Other learning texts are also there. I will be touching these learning texts during my lessons. These texts are also available in soft form. There is another list of learning texts. You can have any of these books. This course is carrying three credit hours and before starting this course, I expect to you having undergone certain courses as prerecourses like financial accounting, financial management or business finance or corporate finance. During the course, if you need to discuss anything relating to the topic taught in the course, you are welcome to write me freely at the course email ID which is FIN702 at the rate of view.edu.pk.