Fight Finance

A project's net present value (NPV) is negative. Select the most correct statement.

When using the dividend discount model, care must be taken to avoid using a nominal dividend growth rate that exceeds the country's nominal GDP growth rate. Otherwise the firm is forecast to take over the country since it grows faster than the average business forever.

Suppose a firm's nominal dividend grows at 10% pa forever, and nominal GDP growth is 5% pa forever. The firm's total dividends are currently $1 billion (t=0). The country's GDP is currently $1,000 billion (t=0).

In approximately how many years will the company's total dividends be as large as the country's GDP?

Which of the following investable assets is the LEAST suitable for valuation using PE multiples techniques?

You are an equities analyst trying to value the equity of the Australian telecoms company Telstra, with ticker TLS. In Australia, listed companies like Telstra tend to pay dividends every 6 months. The payment around August is called the final dividend and the payment around February is called the interim dividend. Both occur annually.

• Today is mid-March 2015.
• TLS's last interim dividend of $0.15 was one month ago in mid-February 2015.
• TLS's last final dividend of $0.15 was seven months ago in mid-August 2014.

Judging by TLS's dividend history and prospects, you estimate that the nominal dividend growth rate will be 1% pa. Assume that TLS's total nominal cost of equity is 6% pa. The dividends are nominal cash flows and the inflation rate is 2.5% pa. All rates are quoted as nominal effective annual rates. Assume that each month is exactly one twelfth (1/12) of a year, so you can ignore the number of days in each month.

Calculate the current TLS share price.

If someone says "my shares rose by 10% last year", what do you assume that they mean? The effective annual:

Five years ago you entered into a fully amortising home loan with a principal of $500,000, an interest rate of 4.5% pa compounding monthly with a term of 25 years.

Then interest rates suddenly fall to 3% pa (t=0), but you continue to pay the same monthly home loan payments as you did before. How long will it now take to pay off your home loan? Measure the time taken to pay off the home loan from the current time which is 5 years after the home loan was first entered into.

Assume that the lower interest rate was given to you immediately after the loan repayment at the end of year 5, which was the 60th payment since the loan was granted. Also assume that rates were and are expected to remain constant.

The below table shows Australian monetary aggregates. Note that ‘M3’ is the sum of all the figures in the table and ‘ADI’ stands for Authorised Deposit-taking Institution such as a bank, building society or credit union.

Source: RBA Statistical Table D3 Monetary Aggregates.

Which of the following statements is NOT correct?

A stock's returns are normally distributed with a mean of 8% pa and a standard deviation of 15 percentage points pa. What is the 99% confidence interval of returns over the next year? Note that the Z-statistic corresponding to a one-tail:

• 90% normal probability density function is 1.282.
• 95% normal probability density function is 1.645.
• 97.5% normal probability density function is 1.960.
• 99% normal probability density function is 2.326.
• 99.5% normal probability density function is 2.576

The 99% confidence interval of annual returns is between:

Below is a graph showing the spread or difference between government bond yields in different countries compared to the US. Assume that all governments have zero credit risk.

According to the principle of cross-currency interest rate parity, which country is likely to have the greatest expected currency appreciation against the USD over the next 2 years?