Visitor $0.00 Login or Register

Fight Finance

Courses Tags Random All Recent Scores

Question 115 capital structure, leverage, WACC

A firm has a debt-to-assets ratio of 50%. The firm then issues a large amount of debt to raise money for new projects of similar market risk to the company's existing projects. Assume a classical tax system. Which statement is correct?

Question 241 Miller and Modigliani, leverage, payout policy, diversification, NPV

One of Miller and Modigliani's (M&M's) important insights is that a firm's managers should not try to achieve a particular level of leverage in a world with zero taxes and perfect information since investors can make their own leverage. Therefore corporate capital structure policy is irrelevant since investors can achieve their own desired leverage at the personal level by borrowing or lending on their own.

This principal of 'home-made' or 'do-it-yourself' leverage can also be applied to other topics. Read the following statements to decide which are true:

(I) Payout policy: a firm's managers should not try to achieve a particular pattern of equity payout.

(II) Agency costs: a firm's managers should not try to minimise agency costs.

(III) Diversification: a firm's managers should not try to diversify across industries.

(IV) Shareholder wealth: a firm's managers should not try to maximise shareholders' wealth.

Which of the above statement(s) are true?

Question 277 derivative terminology, future

Question 282 expected and historical returns, income and capital returns

You're the boss of an investment bank's equities research team. Your five analysts are each trying to find the expected total return over the next year of shares in a mining company. The mining firm:

Is regarded as a mature company since it's quite stable in size and was floated around 30 years ago. It is not a high-growth company;
Share price is very sensitive to changes in the price of the market portfolio, economic growth, the exchange rate and commodities prices. Due to this, its standard deviation of total returns is much higher than that of the market index;
Experienced tough times in the last 10 years due to unexpected falls in commodity prices.
Shares are traded in an active liquid market.

Your team of analysts present their findings, and everyone has different views. While there's no definitive true answer, whose calculation of the expected total return is the most plausible? Assume that:

The analysts' source data is correct and true, but their inferences might be wrong;
All returns and yields are given as effective annual nominal rates.

(a) Alice says 5% pa since she calculated that this was the average total yield on government bonds over the last 10 years. She says that this is also the expected total yield implied by current prices on one year government bonds.

(b) Bob says 4% pa since he calculated that this was the average total return on the mining stock over the last 10 years.

(c) Cate says 3% pa since she calculated that this was the average growth rate of the share price over the last 10 years.

(d) Dave says 6% pa since he calculated that this was the average growth rate of the share market price index (not the accumulation index) over the last 10 years.

(e) Eve says 15% pa since she calculated that this was the discount rate implied by the dividend discount model using the current share price, forecast dividend in one year and a 3% growth rate in dividends thereafter, which is the expected long term inflation rate.

Question 324 foreign exchange rate

The Chinese government attempts to fix its exchange rate against the US dollar and at the same time use monetary policy to fix its interest rate at a set level.

To be able to fix its exchange rate and interest rate in this way, what does the Chinese government actually do?

Adopts capital controls to prevent financial arbitrage by private firms and individuals.
Adopts the same interest rate (monetary policy) as the United States.
Fixes inflation so that the domestic real interest rate is equal to the United States' real interest rate.

Which of the above statements is or are true?

Question 361 CFFA

Over the next year, the management of an unlevered company plans to:

Make $5m in sales, $1.9m in net income and $2m in equity free cash flow (EFCF).
Pay dividends of $1m.
Complete a $1.3m share buy-back.

Assume that:

All amounts are received and paid at the end of the year so you can ignore the time value of money.
The firm has sufficient retained profits to legally pay the dividend and complete the buy back.
The firm plans to run a very tight ship, with no excess cash above operating requirements currently or over the next year.

How much new equity financing will the company need? In other words, what is the value of new shares that will need to be issued?

Question 402 PE ratio, no explanation

Which of the following companies is most suitable for valuation using PE multiples techniques?

Question 792 mean and median returns, return distribution, arithmetic and geometric averages, continuously compounding rate, log-normal distribution, confidence interval

A risk manager has identified that their investment fund’s continuously compounded portfolio returns are normally distributed with a mean of 10% pa and a standard deviation of 40% 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. Assume one month is 1/12 of a year. Which of the following statements is NOT correct?

Question 881 Nixon Shock, Bretton Woods, foreign exchange rate, foreign exchange system history, no explanation

In the ‘Nixon Shock’ on August 15, 1971, the United States government:

Question 915 price gains and returns over time, IRR, NPV, income and capital returns, effective return

For a share price to double over 7 years, what must its capital return be as an effective annual rate?