Question 104 CAPM, payout policy, capital structure, Miller and Modigliani, risk
Assume that there exists a perfect world with no transaction costs, no asymmetric information, no taxes, no agency costs, equal borrowing rates for corporations and individual investors, the ability to short the risk free asset, semi-strong form efficient markets, the CAPM holds, investors are rational and risk-averse and there are no other market frictions.
For a firm operating in this perfect world, which statement(s) are correct?
(i) When a firm changes its capital structure and/or payout policy, share holders' wealth is unaffected.
(ii) When the idiosyncratic risk of a firm's assets increases, share holders do not expect higher returns.
(iii) When the systematic risk of a firm's assets increases, share holders do not expect higher returns.
Select the most correct response:
You're trying to save enough money to buy your first car which costs $2,500. You can save $100 at the end of each month starting from now. You currently have no money at all. You just opened a bank account with an interest rate of 6% pa payable monthly.
How many months will it take to save enough money to buy the car? Assume that the price of the car will stay the same over time.
A large proportion of a levered firm's assets is cash held at the bank. The firm is financed with half equity and half debt.
Which of the following statements about this firm's enterprise value (EV) and total asset value (V) is NOT correct?
What is the correlation of a variable X with itself?
The corr(X, X) or ##\rho_{X,X}## equals:
Let the 'income return' of a bond be the coupon at the end of the period divided by the market price now at the start of the period ##(C_1/P_0)##. The expected income return of a premium fixed coupon bond is:
An equity index fund manager controls a USD1 billion diversified equity portfolio with a beta of 1.3. The equity manager fears that a global recession will begin in the next year, causing equity prices to tumble. The market does not think that this will happen. If the fund manager wishes to reduce her portfolio beta to 0.5, how many S&P500 futures should she sell?
The US market equity index is the S&P500. One year CME futures on the S&P500 currently trade at 2,062 points and the spot price is 2,091 points. Each point is worth $250. How many one year S&P500 futures contracts should the fund manager sell?
Question 730 DDM, income and capital returns, no explanation
A stock’s current price is $1. Its expected total return is 10% pa and its long term expected capital return is 4% pa. It pays an annual dividend and the next one will be paid in one year. All rates are given as effective annual rates. The dividend discount model is thought to be a suitable model for the stock. Ignore taxes. Which of the following statements about the stock is NOT correct?
Question 748 income and capital returns, DDM, ex dividend date
A stock will pay you a dividend of $2 tonight if you buy it today.
Thereafter the annual dividend is expected to grow by 3% pa, so the next dividend after the $2 one tonight will be $2.06 in one year, then in two years it will be $2.1218 and so on. The stock's required return is 8% pa.
What is the stock price today and what do you expect the stock price to be tomorrow, approximately?
Question 791 mean and median returns, return distribution, arithmetic and geometric averages, continuously compounding rate, log-normal distribution, VaR, confidence interval
A risk manager has identified that their pension fund’s continuously compounded portfolio returns are normally distributed with a mean of 5% pa and a standard deviation of 20% pa. The fund’s portfolio is currently valued at $1 million. Assume that there is no estimation error in the above figures. To simplify your calculations, all answers below use 2.33 as an approximation for the normal inverse cumulative density function at 99%. All answers are rounded to the nearest dollar. Which of the following statements is NOT correct?