Curriculum

Before shares or stock markets, we need a shared vocabulary: money, income, savings, investing, assets and liabilities.

A company turns an idea into a business that earns revenue, incurs costs, and hopefully makes a profit.

A share is a unit of ownership. This chapter makes proportion, value and dilution completely concrete.

A stock market is a marketplace: an organised set of rules and systems where people buy and sell shares of companies.

The NSE and BSE are India's two main stock exchanges. Learn what an exchange does, how companies get listed, and when the market trades.

SEBI regulates India's securities market. Behind the scenes, brokers, depositories and clearing corporations keep trading safe and settled.

To buy and hold shares in India you generally need a trading account and a demat account, alongside your ordinary bank account.

An IPO is when a company offers its shares to the public for the first time. This is the primary market, where new shares are created and sold.

Prices change when buyers and sellers disagree about value. Supply, demand, expectations, news and the wider economy all play a part.

An order is your instruction to the market. This chapter explains how market, limit, stop-loss and stop-limit orders differ, and why none of them is a guarantee.

Market writing is full of shorthand. This chapter untangles the words you will meet constantly, one plain-English definition at a time.

Market cap is the market's price tag for a company's shares. This chapter shows how it is calculated and what the large, mid and small cap bands really mean.

Every listed company reports its numbers three ways: what it earned, what it owns, and where its cash went. This chapter is your map to all three.

The income statement shows how much a company earned over a period, and how much of it survived costs, interest and tax.

The balance sheet freezes a moment in time and answers two questions at once: what does the company own, and who financed it?

The cash flow statement ignores accounting estimates and tracks real cash. It shows whether a business is generating money or burning it.

A company can report a healthy profit and still run short of cash. This advanced chapter explains why profit and cash flow differ, and how to bridge the two.

EPS turns a company's total profit into a per-share number, so profit can be compared with the share price — and so dilution becomes visible.

The P/E ratio links share price to earnings. Learn what it means, why companies differ, and why it is a question to investigate rather than a verdict.

The price-to-book ratio compares the market price of a share with the accounting net worth behind it. Useful for some businesses, misleading for others.

ROE measures profit as a share of shareholders' equity. It is powerful, widely used, and easy to misread without context.

ROCE measures operating profit against all the long-term capital a business uses — both equity and debt — making it a fairer lens across different financing choices.

Borrowing can fund growth, but it also creates obligations. Debt-to-equity shows how much of a company's funding comes from lenders versus owners.

Margins show profit as a percentage of revenue at each stage of the income statement. Comparing them like with like reveals pricing power and cost pressure.

Growth can be measured in revenue, profit or EPS. Learn to read year-on-year growth and to summarise several years with CAGR — and why the past is not a promise.

A dividend is a share of profit paid to owners. This chapter explains what it is, how it is measured, and what a very high or very low dividend can quietly signal.

A corporate action is an event a company carries out that affects its shares. Splits, bonus shares, buybacks and rights issues all change the number of shares or who owns them.

Market capitalisation values only the equity. Enterprise value values the whole business — equity plus debt minus cash — so businesses with different borrowings can be compared fairly.

EV/EBITDA compares the value of the whole business to its operating cash earnings. It is useful because it is independent of financing, but it has important blind spots.

Working capital is the money tied up in running the business day to day: what customers owe, what sits in stock, and what the company still owes suppliers. It is a key link between profit and cash.

Companies do not operate in a vacuum. Interest rates, inflation, the rupee, GDP growth, commodity prices and government policy all shape the environment in which businesses earn profits. This chapter explains the links — without forecasting.

Before any numbers, understand the business itself: what it sells, who pays, how it earns money, what it costs to run, and what could go wrong.

A ten-step habit for studying any company — a thinking process, not an automatic ranking or a recommendation.

Patterns in the accounts that are worth investigating, and why none of them is proof on its own.

Apply the process to ABC Manufacturing, a fictional Indian company, and form your own independent view.