Diversification in a portfolio of two assets works best when the correlation between their returns is:
You want to buy a house priced at $400,000. You have saved a deposit of $40,000. The bank has agreed to lend you $360,000 as a fully amortising loan with a term of 30 years. The interest rate is 8% pa payable monthly and is not expected to change.
What will be your monthly payments?
A 10 year Australian government bond was just issued at par with a yield of 3.9% pa. The fixed coupon payments are semi-annual. The bond has a face value of $1,000.
Six months later, just after the first coupon is paid, the yield of the bond decreases to 3.65% pa. What is the bond's new price?
Which of the following equations is NOT equal to the total return of an asset?
Let ##p_0## be the current price, ##p_1## the expected price in one year and ##c_1## the expected income in one year.
An investor owns a whole level of an old office building which is currently worth $1 million. There are three mutually exclusive projects that can be started by the investor. The office building level can be:
- Rented out to a tenant for one year at $0.1m paid immediately, and then sold for $0.99m in one year.
- Refurbished into more modern commercial office rooms at a cost of $1m now, and then sold for $2.4m when the refurbishment is finished in one year.
- Converted into residential apartments at a cost of $2m now, and then sold for $3.4m when the conversion is finished in one year.
All of the development projects have the same risk so the required return of each is 10% pa. The table below shows the estimated cash flows and internal rates of returns (IRR's).
| Mutually Exclusive Projects | |||
| Project | Cash flow now ($) |
Cash flow in one year ($) |
IRR (% pa) |
| Rent then sell as is | -900,000 | 990,000 | 10 |
| Refurbishment into modern offices | -2,000,000 | 2,400,000 | 20 |
| Conversion into residential apartments | -3,000,000 | 3,400,000 | 13.33 |
Which project should the investor accept?
An equity index is currently at 5,000 points. The 2 year futures price is 5,400 points and the total required return is 8% pa with continuous compounding. Each index point is worth $25.
What is the implied continuous dividend yield as a continuously compounded rate per annum?
"Buy low, sell high" is a phrase commonly heard in financial markets. It states that traders should try to buy assets at low prices and sell at high prices.
Traders in the fixed-coupon bond markets often quote promised bond yields rather than prices. Fixed-coupon bond traders should try to:
An economy has only two investable assets: stocks and cash.
Stocks had a historical nominal average total return of negative two percent per annum (-2% pa) over the last 20 years. Stocks are liquid and actively traded. Stock returns are variable, they have risk.
Cash is riskless and has a nominal constant return of zero percent per annum (0% pa), which it had in the past and will have in the future. Cash can be kept safely at zero cost. Cash can be converted into shares and vice versa at zero cost.
The nominal total return of the shares over the next year is expected to be:
Question 639 option, option payoff at maturity, no explanation
Which of the below formulas gives the payoff ##(f)## at maturity ##(T)## from being short a put option? Let the underlying asset price at maturity be ##S_T## and the exercise price be ##X_T##.
Alice, Bob, Chris and Delta are traders in the futures market. The following trades occur over a single day in a newly-opened equity index future that matures in one year which the exchange just made available.
1. Alice buys 2 futures from Bob.
2. Chris buys 3 futures from Delta.
3. Delta buys 5 futures from Alice.
Which of the following statements is NOT correct?