In this course, we focused on what I like to call the finance of mergers and acquisitions. M&A is a very rich field that has other aspects such as strategic aspects etc, but our course focuses on the finance of M&A. In particular, in this course we focused a lot on valuation. We learned how to value and price an M&A deal. We talked about valuing targets, acquirer, valuing synergies, and how to use these valuations in the design of an M&A during the real-world. Then we also talked about the relationship between valuation and pricing. Of course, the valuation of an M&A deal is directly related to the pricing of the deal and vice versa. These two objects interact with each other and now you know how to deal with that. In terms of the modules, we actually started this course with a broad overview of M&A topics, which covers the history of M&A, and the key terminology that we use to talk about M&A deals, and then we went more specifically into valuation. In Module 2, we talked about company valuation, the main techniques to place a value on companies including multiples and discounted cash-flow. Then in Module 3, we learned how to use these valuations in M&A, so what is the role of target and acquirer valuation as drivers of M&A deals? Then finally in Module 4, we talked about synergies. The synergies are the new value that is created by an M&A deal, and you also learned how to place a value on synergies. Then as a bonus, we also talked about hostile takeovers in Module 4, which is a very important interesting part of the takeover market. That's when the target does not want to be acquired and offers resistance to the bidder, and then there is this interesting battle that we talked about, that have some valuation implications as well. I really emphasize the fact that in this course there is no compromise, so in some cases it may have been harder than what I could have done, but I really tried to bring state of the art methods to my courses. So the methods and theories in this course, they try to reflect the most up-to-date research in the finance of M&A. Even when that might make it harder in some cases, we have to go over more details, more complicated financial models, but as I see it, my goal is to really try to bring the up-to-date research, the state of the art techniques to the classroom, to our virtual classroom, so you can learn about those and start applying these in the real world as well. Just around the corner there is a new MOOC, MOOC 2, which is the follow-up to this course, where we're going to talk about how to fully design the finance of a successful M&A deal. So valuation is not the end of the story; beyond the corner there are other things that we need to learn for example, creating financial statements, talking about the means of payment, so are you going to pay stock or cash, and very importantly, talking about financing. M&A deals are very large, and they have very important implications for financing, so it's actually turns out to be an excellent laboratory to study corporate financial decision. If you like this MOOC, I highly recommend that you also take MOOC 2, the two MOOC's actually go very well together. Then finally, just a big thank you, hearing many languages including my own Portuguese. Just I want to thank you for taking your time to watch these videos, work on the quizzes. I hope you have learned something about M&A, as I just said I tried to make this very state of the art and as helpful as I can, as up-to-date as I can, so you learn as much as possible about M&A during this course. Thank you.
