Breaking Into Wall Street – Project Finance & Infrastructure Modeling

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Breaking Into Wall Street – Project Finance & Infrastructure Modeling

Project Finance & Infrastructure Modeling – How to Master Cash Flow Projections, Debt Sculpting, and Infrastructure Asset Modeling – So You Can Ace Your Project Finance Case Studies and Win Offers

Evaluate infrastructure deals like a pro

You’ll evaluate the risks and rewards and make investment recommendations

Master financial modeling

Model solar, wind, gas, nuclear, toll road, airport, and mining assets

Complete 8 case studies

Build 4 shorter “crash course” models and 4 detailed “on the job” ones

I won’t mix words: Most Project Finance training is terrible.

Whether you’re looking at paid courses, in-person training, or free resources, most training uses two equally useless approaches: 

Wrong Approach #1: Convoluted Models – Complex models can be nice, but when you’re completing case studies in an interview setting, no one will ask you for a 5,000-row Excel model with built-in VBA and macros. And when you’re on the job, shorter, simpler models are more useful if you need a quick reference or formulas you can re-purpose for your current task.

Wrong Approach #2: “Barely Project Finance” Financial Modeling – On the other end of the spectrum, some of this training is so simple and generic that it’s a stretch to call it “Project Finance.” You can project the cash flows for almost any asset, but you need a lot more than simple cash flows linked to energy production to call it a “Project Finance model.”

The correct approach – the one our course uses – is based on real-life case studies given in interviews.

We don’t teach 5,000-row Excel models that require 30 hours to understand; we teach what you need to know to complete case studies.

That means the models in this course are in the “intermediate zone,” with each one taking up 50 to 300 rows in Excel (the “on the job” case studies go beyond this since they are intentionally more complex).

It’s enough to learn the core concepts and finish in a few hours, but not so much that you get lost in a pile of minutiae under some broken wind turbines.

We created this course by gathering dozens of case study examples from students who had been through interviews at Infrastructure Private Equity firms and Project Finance groups and synthesizing the best parts of their cases.

Our approach focuses on the 3 most important points in Project Finance Modeling:

1) Cash Flow Projections – You need to know how to move from energy production or traffic levels to revenue and expenses and how items such as depreciation, loan fees, and interest factor into an asset’s cash flows.

If you get your units wrong, your offshore wind farm might morph into a nuclear plant and have a meltdown or two – and you won’t be able to blame it on Homer Simpson!

2) Debt Sizing and Sculpting – Project Finance is fundamentally different from corporate finance because of this focus on sculpting the Debt to match the asset’s future cash flows. And you must know how to set up debt sizing and sculpting with standard Excel formulas, Goal Seek, simple VBA code, and circular reference switches.

3) Investment Recommendations – Finally, you need to understand how to put together all the pieces to make an investment recommendation. You must be able to read the numbers in the different cases, assess the risk factors, and say “Yes” or “No” to a deal.

No other training on the market puts together all the pieces quite like this because they’re too busy teaching confusing models that require a Ph.D. to understand.

This course has 8 case studies ranging from 30 minutes to 4 hours, so you can pick your ideal learning path based on how much time you have.

Through these case studies, you’ll learn to:

• Project cash flows for different types of infrastructure assets, ranging from renewables to fossil fuels to nuclear to toll roads and airports.
• Understand timelines and flags in infrastructure models and how they factor into debt refinancing, sculpting, and sizing.
• Build the key drivers for infrastructure assets, including the links between energy production under different contract types and revenue (and, for transportation, the links between GDP, inflation, and growth rates).
• Calculate the key metrics for infrastructure assets for both the equity investors and the lenders, including the equity IRR and cash-on-cash multiple, the Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR), the Loan Life Coverage Ratio (LLCR), the Project Life Coverage Ratio (PLCR), and the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE).
• Sculpt and size Debt properly based on minimum DSCR and LLCR targets – with standard Excel formulas, Goal Seek, simple VBA code, or circular calculations.
• Handle multiple tranches of Debt, such as one tranche with a “merchant tail” and fixed amortization or two tranches that are both sculpted and sized based on the asset’s cash flows.
• Build in reserve accounts, such as the Debt Service Reserve Account (DSRA), Major Maintenance Reserve Account (MMRA), and Decommissioning Reserve, and analyze their impact on the cash flows.
• Model construction periods in development deals, including tricks to avoid the circular references created by the interest during construction (IDC) and the loan commitment fees.
• Use VBA to avoid circular references, size and sculpt Debt properly, build sensitivity tables, and back-solve for key assumptions such as the proper PPA rates in different scenarios.
• Make investment recommendations based on the deal’s expected returns and the key risk factors.

Sale Page: https://breakingintowallstreet.com/project-finance-modeling/

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