Learn the Lingo (I-Banking)

Due to my limited view of i-banking, a lot of this will be general accounting stuff, and I'm going to stick to financial accounting (there's another type called managerial accounting that I'm sure MBAs can tell you all about, but you tend to use financial accounting in banking). I think you will find that a lot of what i-bankers do is accounting related (it's about tearing apart companies, after all). I guess research analyst types will often be in this realm too:

Double entry book-keeping: A type of accounting where all costs and income are listed twice. This is the norm.
Balance sheet: One of the three main accounting statements. The balance sheet is a snapshot of the company's financial state. In accrual accounting it lists assets and liabilities separately, and they should balance: assets = liabilities + stockholder's equity (for some reason stockholder's equity is always listed with liabilities, I don't know why. I guess just so the two columns can balance).
Income Statement: One of the three main accounting statements. The income statement summarizes the revenues and expenses over a period of time. This is sometimes mixed with what they call a statement of retained earnings. Basically the income statement shows revenues and expenses to find the net income. Then the dividends are taken out to get the retained earnings.
Cash Flow Statement: One of the three main accounting statements. Where the other two statements focus on the profitability of the company, this one focuses on the company's liquidity. It shows the in/out flows of cash for a company for a period of time.
Liquidity: The ability of assets to be turned into cash (or already in the state of cash). As they say "cash is king." Without cash you can not pay off debts (the bank won't accept, for example, your inventory of condoms to pay off your loan.
Common Stock: In terms of accounting, this refers to the "owners" investments in the company. This could be the owners plowing their savings into the company or money generated by an IPO.
Stockholders Equity: I see this as the value generated by the company. As far as I can tell it's just a number made up so that assets = liabilities + equity. I can't imagine coming up with this number any other way than accounting for assets and liabilities then subtracting.
Net Income: see income statement
Retained earnings: see income statement
GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Basically, this is how you need to do your accounting. They're written out.
IPO: Initial public offering. This is what a lot of people think i-banking is all about. It's really not. It is, however, a bit part (and very profitable). An IPO is where a company first "goes public," that is it sells shares in the company for cash. Shares represent ownership. If you own all the stock, you own the company.
Debt offering: Companies can also take out loans from the general public by selling bonds. This is actually a larger part of the finance world than equity.
Road Show: Analysts love these, senior people often find them a pain in the ass. Basically it's a traveling salesman type thing where the bankers go to a bunch of cities to make presentations about a given IPO or debt offering.
Beauty Contest: I forget what the official name for these is. Basically when a company decides it wants to raise capital (read: cash), it can have a bunch of investment banks come in and pitch their ideas on how the capital should be raised. There are some pretty interesting ideas that often go into these, actually. It's not just plain vanilla debt and equity, you can really mix it up with some interesting instruments.
M&A: Mergers and acquisitions. When a company wants to buy another company or merge with another company, they talk to the M&A guys. M&A guys tend to work more than anyone else on the street (except maybe Private Equity?), think 120hrs a week. If you think that's impossible, you've got another thing coming to you.
NPV: Net present value. Money in the future is worth less than money now (I'd rather have my Ferrari now than in 10 years, wouldn't you?). So we discount back future cashflows by some "discount factor." Usually an interest rate or a "hurdle rate."
DCF model: Discounted Cash Flow model. This is the bread and butter of i-banker types (and equity/credit research analysts for that matter). These things usually manifest themselves as giant excel sheets in which analysts predict the revenues/sales and costs a company will have in the future. They then choose a "discount rate" with which to discount their cashflows back.
Multiples method: This one's awesome. Basically you value a company by looking at how comparable companies are being valued. Oh you're a search company? Google's being valued at 200 times expected revenue in the market, so you must also be worth that much! WOW! Usually they look at the multiples (Price/earnings, EBITDA to Enterprise value, etc) and try to value a company by comparison.
EBITDA: Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Just as it sounds, it's the earnings before you factor in all that crap.
Enterprise Value: Some measure of the value of a firm, often they just take the market capitalization + debt + minority interest + preferred shares - cash. This represents how much you'd have to pay to buy the firm outright.
Depreciation: The value lost by an asset over time. Like your car used be worth 20k, but now it's worth 10k just be using it normally.
Amortization: Sort of related to depreciation, but it can go up or down. It's most commonly used in terms of intellectual property. For some reason intellectual property amortizes instead of depreciates over time. Go figure.
CAPM: Capital Assets Pricing Model. This is used in both asset management and in company valuation. It most commonly is used to find the discount rate of a company's cashflows in i-banking. It's crap, but everyone uses it. Basically it finds how the company is valued in the stock market in terms of the rate of return expected. That rate then becomes your discount rate.Default: When a company or person decides not to pay / can not pay their debts. Like when you quit your job and can't pay off your student loans.
Goodwill: Something you will not come accross often in banking. Just kidding, you'll come across it all the time in accounting statements where they have a value to something intangible (like "brand name"). Companies sometimes pay dearly for "goodwill" in mergers/acquisitions. Market Cap: Market capitalization, the total value of a company in the stock market.
Dividend: Companies sometimes pay out some cash to stockholders from the earnings of a company. This cash is called a dividend.
Preferred stock: These are strange. They have a set dividend (as opposed to a dividend that can change like for normal stock) that gets paid before normal stocks are paid (but doesn't "have" to be paid like interest on debt). Sometimes it can be converted into normal stock.
Convertible bonds: These are bonds, but they have a clause that lets them turn into stocks at a certain ratio. Basically it's a way for a company to get lower interest rates with the caveat that if the company does really well, the ownership gets diluted by convert holders.
Munis: Municipal bonds. Lots of states/cities/government entities sell bonds. These are called munis. Might be worth noting that a lot of municipals are now also leasing off assets in whole, the equivalent of an LBO or IPO on government property/companies --cool, eh? The big example is the Chicago skyway (it's a toll road that's now privately owned, for the most part).
LBO: Leveraged Buy-Out. Really it's just an acquisition that involves taking out a lot of debt to be able to buy the company. It's like when you buy a house with only 5% down. Then you're really doing a leveraged buy-out of that house =P.

A note: to be considered proficient in accounting, you should be able to build any of the three main accounting statements from the other two. This is the quick and dirty acid test CPAs often ask me to see if I actually know accounting despite never working with financial statements.

I will post an example of a DCF sheet by Goldman or something at some point, assuming blogger allows this sort of thing.