Fight Finance

Question 177  implicit interest rate in wholesale credit

A furniture distributor offers credit to its customers. Customers are given 25 days to pay for their goods, but if they pay immediately they will get a 1% discount.

What is the effective interest rate implicit in the discount being offered? Assume 365 days in a year and that all customers pay either immediately or on the 25th day. All rates given below are effective annual rates.

(a) 0.0004

(b) 0.1301

(c) 0.1365

(d) 0.1460

(e) 0.1580

Question 258  bill pricing, simple interest rate

A 60-day Bank Accepted Bill has a face value of $1,000,000. The interest rate is 8% pa and there are 365 days in the year. What is its price now?

(a) $913,907.4174

(b) $925,925.9259

(c) $974,611.7471

(d) $987,020.0108

(e) $987,428.5591

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 389  real option, option

You're thinking of starting a new cafe business, but you're not sure if it will be profitable.

You have to decide what type of cups, mugs and glasses you wish to buy. You can pay to have your cafe's name printed on them, or just buy the plain un-marked ones. For marketing reasons it's better to have the cafe name printed. But the plain un-marked cups, mugs and glasses maximise your:

(a) Expansion option.

(b) Abandonment option.

(c) Timing (or delaying) option.

(d) Production (or switching) option.

(e) Underlying asset.

Question 527  income and capital returns

Total cash flows can be broken into income and capital cash flows.

What is the name given to the cash flow generated from selling shares at a higher price than they were bought?

(a) Dividends.

(b) Rent.

(c) Coupons.

(d) Loan payments.

(e) Capital gains.

Question 530  Annuity, annuity due, no explanation

You are promised 20 payments of $100, where the first payment is immediate (t=0) and the last is at the end of the 19th year (t=19). The effective annual discount rate is ##r##.

Which of the following equations does NOT give the correct present value of these 20 payments?

(a) ##V_0=\dfrac{\dfrac{100}{r} \left( 1- \dfrac{1}{(1+r)^{20}} \right) }{(1+r)^1} ##

(b) ##V_0=\dfrac{100}{r} \left( 1- \dfrac{1}{(1+r)^{20}} \right) (1+r)^1##

(c) ##V_0=\dfrac{100}{r} \left( 1- \dfrac{1}{(1+r)^{19}} \right) +100##

(d) ##V_0=\dfrac{100(1+r)^1}{r} \left( 1- \dfrac{1}{(1+r)^{20}} \right) ##

(e) ##V_0=100 \left( 1-(1+r)^{-19} \right) r^{-1}+100##

Question 623  market efficiency

The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) and no-arbitrage pricing theory are most closely related to which of the following concepts?

(a) Competition.

(b) Opportunity costs.

(c) Separation of the investment and financing decisions.

(d) Diversification.

(e) The stand-alone principle, incremental cash flows and sunk costs.

Question 631  foreign exchange rate

The Australian dollar's value was:

1.4875 USD per AUD on 31 August 1974.
0.4890 USD per AUD on 31 March 2001.

Did the Australian dollar or against the US dollar between these dates?

Question 741  APR, effective rate

A home loan company advertises an interest rate of 4.5% pa, payable monthly. Which of the following statements about the interest rate is NOT correct?

(a) The APR compounding monthly is 4.5% pa.

(b) The effective monthly rate is 0.3675% pa.

(c) The effective annual rate is 4.594% pa.

(d) The effective 6 month rate is 2.2712% pa.

(e) The APR compounding semi-annually is 4.5424% pa.

Question 875  omitted variable bias, systematic and idiosyncratic risk, CAPM, single factor model, two factor model

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Single Index Model (SIM) are single factor models whose only risk factor is the market portfolio’s return. Say a Solar electricity generator company and a Beach bathing chair renting company are influenced by two factors, the market portfolio return and cloud cover in the sky. When it's sunny and not cloudy, both the Solar and Beach companies’ stock prices do well. When there’s dense cloud cover and no sun, both do poorly. Assume that cloud coverage risk is a systematic risk that cannot be diversified and that cloud cover has zero correlation with the market portfolio’s returns.

Which of the following statements about these two stocks is NOT correct?

The CAPM and SIM:

(a) Betas of the Solar and Beach companies will only measure the companies’ sensitivity to the market portfolio risk factor, not the cloud coverage factor.

(b) Will under-estimate the Solar and Beach stocks’ systematic variance.

(c) Will under-estimate the Solar and Beach stocks’ diversifiable variance.

(d) Models will show positive correlations between the Solar and Beach stock’s residual (also called idiosyncratic or diversifiable) returns.