Corporate Finance
When an entrepreneur on Shark Tank offers "10% of my company for $100,000," they are giving up this standard corporate asset type in exchange for capital.
Equity (or common stock)
When you use a free smartphone app like Robinhood, Groww, or Zerodha to buy a fractional piece of a company, you are purchasing this basic unit of ownership.
Share (or stock)
This term describes the combination of two relatively equal-sized companies to form a single, brand-new corporate entity.
Merger
This specific term represents the percentage of a loan amount that a bank charges a borrower as a fee for lending them money.
Interest rate
To a biology major, it’s the basic unit of life. To a finance major, it's a little rectangular box where a formula goes to die.
Cell
This financial scenario occurs when a company's available cash is so low that it cannot pay its suppliers, employees, or creditors on time, forcing them to restructure or seek emergency funding.
Insolvency
Just like you go to a shopping mall to buy clothes, investors use this centralized virtual or physical marketplace—such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or National Stock Exchange (NSE)—to buy and sell public corporate shares.
Stock exchange (or stock market)
In late 2025, Netflix shook the media world by announcing an $82.7 billion deal to fully buy out Warner Bros. This classic transaction—where one corporate giant buys a majority stake to completely take control of another firm—is known by this term.
Acquisition
This traditional banking method involves a borrower providing an asset, like a car or house, as a security pledge that the bank can seize if the loan isn't repaid.
Collateral
Decode the word - O D N U
UNDO
This metric, found by subtracting current liabilities from current assets, measures a firm's short-term liquidity.
Working capital
This term describes a prolonged market period characterized by rising asset prices and widespread investor optimism.
Bull market
This term describes an M&A deal where a company acquires a supplier or a distributor within its own supply chain rather than a direct competitor.
Vertical integration
This metric, ranging from 300 to 850, is calculated by bureaus like Experian to tell a bank exactly how likely a borrower is to default on a loan.
Credit score
Decode the word - M U S F I
SUMIF
This capital budgeting rule states that a project should be accepted if this specific value is greater than zero.
Net Present Value (NPV)
This investment vehicle pools money from retail investors to purchase a diversified portfolio of stocks or bonds, but unlike an ETF, it only trades once at the end of the day.
Mutual fund
When a company is acquired, the buyer pays for tangible things like factories and inventory. However, any excess cash paid for the target's stellar brand reputation, loyal customer base, or top-tier talent cannot be physically touched and is recorded on the balance sheet under this single 8-letter accounting term.
Goodwill
This foundational practice requires banks to verify a customer’s identity and assess their legal risks before opening a new account to prevent fraud.
KYC (Know Your Customer)
This powerful, interactive Excel feature allows an analyst to instantly summarize, sort, reorganize, and group thousands of rows of raw corporate transaction data into a clean, customizable summary table without writing a single formula.
Pivot Table
This specific metric represents the cash a company generates after accounting for cash outflows to support operations and maintain its capital assets.
Free Cash Flow to the Firm (FCFF)
This trading strategy involves selling a borrowed security with the expectation that its price will decrease, allowing it to be bought back cheaper later.
Short selling (or shorting)
This specific metric measures the total cost to buy a company, calculated by adding market cap, total debt, and preferred stock, then subtracting cash.
Enterprise Value (EV)
This specific term describes a bank loan that is officially in default because the borrower has failed to make any scheduled interest or principal payments for 90 days.
Non-performing loan (NPL/NPA)
This legendary, classic 7-letter Excel function searches for a specific value in the leftmost column of a data table and returns a matching value from another column to the right, but notoriously breaks if you insert a new column into your model.
VLOOKUP