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Your main expense is fuel for your car which costs $100 per month. You just refueled, so you won't need any more fuel for another month (first payment at t=1 month).

You have $2,500 in a bank account which pays interest at a rate of 6% pa, payable monthly. Interest rates are not expected to change.

Assuming that you have no income, in how many months time will you not have enough money to fully refuel your car?

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 311 foreign exchange rate

When someone says that they're "buying American dollars" (USD), what type of asset are they probably buying? They're probably buying:

Question 492 capital budgeting, opportunity cost, sunk cost

A man has taken a day off from his casual painting job to relax.

It's the end of the day and he's thinking about the hours that he could have spent working (in the past) which are now:

Question 571 foreign exchange rate

An Indonesian lady wishes to convert 1 million Indonesian rupiah (IDR) to Australian dollars (AUD). Exchange rates are 13,125 IDR per USD and 0.79 USD per AUD. How many AUD is the IDR 1 million worth?

Question 629 yield curve, forward interest rate

Which of the following statements about yield curves is NOT correct?

Question 642 future, no explanation

Which of the below formulas gives the payoff at maturity ##(f_T)## from being short a future? Let the underlying asset price at maturity be ##S_T## and the locked-in futures price be ##K_T##.

Question 704 utility, risk aversion, utility function, gamble

Mr Blue, Miss Red and Mrs Green are people with different utility functions.

Each person has $256 of initial wealth. A coin toss game is offered to each person at a casino where the player can win or lose $256. Each player can flip a coin and if they flip heads, they receive $256. If they flip tails then they will lose $256. Which of the following statements is NOT correct?

Question 867 limited liability, business structure

Which one of the following businesses is likely to be a public company in Australia, judging by its name?

Question 921 utility, return distribution, log-normal distribution, arithmetic and geometric averages, no explanation

Who was the first theorist to propose the idea of ‘expected utility’?