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:
Which one of the following bonds is trading at par?
Three important classes of investable risky assets are:
- Corporate debt which has low total risk,
- Real estate which has medium total risk,
- Equity which has high total risk.
Assume that the correlation between total returns on:
- Corporate debt and real estate is 0.1,
- Corporate debt and equity is 0.1,
- Real estate and equity is 0.5.
You are considering investing all of your wealth in one or more of these asset classes. Which portfolio will give the lowest total risk? You are restricted from shorting any of these assets. Disregard returns and the risk-return trade-off, pretend that you are only concerned with minimising risk.
Question 308 risk, standard deviation, variance, no explanation
A stock's standard deviation of returns is expected to be:
- 0.09 per month for the first 5 months;
- 0.14 per month for the next 7 months.
What is the expected standard deviation of the stock per year ##(\sigma_\text{annual})##?
Assume that returns are independently and identically distributed (iid) and therefore have zero auto-correlation.
The hardest and most important aspect of business project valuation is the estimation of the:
In the 'Austin Powers' series of movies, the character Dr. Evil threatens to destroy the world unless the United Nations pays him a ransom (video 1, video 2). Dr. Evil makes the threat on two separate occasions:
- In 1969 he demands a ransom of $1 million (=10^6), and again;
- In 1997 he demands a ransom of $100 billion (=10^11).
If Dr. Evil's demands are equivalent in real terms, in other words $1 million will buy the same basket of goods in 1969 as $100 billion would in 1997, what was the implied inflation rate over the 28 years from 1969 to 1997?
The answer choices below are given as effective annual rates:
A trader sells one crude oil European style call option contract on the CME expiring in one year with an exercise price of $44 per barrel for a price of $6.64. The crude oil spot price is $40.33. If the trader doesn’t close out her contract before maturity, then at maturity she will have the:
Question 807 market efficiency, expected and historical returns, CAPM, beta, systematic risk, no explanation
You work in Asia and just woke up. It looked like a nice day but then you read the news and found out that last night the American share market fell by 10% while you were asleep due to surprisingly poor macro-economic world news. You own a portfolio of liquid stocks listed in Asia with a beta of 1.6. When the Asian equity markets open, what do you expect to happen to your share portfolio? Assume that the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is correct and that the market portfolio contains all shares in the world, of which American shares are a big part. Your portfolio beta is measured against this world market portfolio.
When the Asian equity market opens for trade, you would expect your portfolio value to:
Question 810 CAPM, systematic and idiosyncratic risk, market efficiency
Examine the graphs below. Assume that asset A is a single stock. Which of the following statements is NOT correct? Asset A:
