Question 579 price gains and returns over time, time calculation, effective rate
How many years will it take for an asset's price to double if the price grows by 10% pa?
The price of gold is currently $700 per ounce. The forward price for delivery in 1 year is $800. An arbitrageur can borrow money at 10% per annum given as an effective discrete annual rate. Assume that gold is fairly priced and the cost of storing gold is zero.
What is the best way to conduct an arbitrage in this situation? The best arbitrage strategy requires zero capital, has zero risk and makes money straight away. An arbitrageur should sell 1 forward on gold and:
Mr Blue, Miss Red and Mrs Green are people with different utility functions. Which of the statements about the 3 utility functions is NOT correct?
Question 758 time calculation, fully amortising loan, no explanation
Two years ago you entered into a fully amortising home loan with a principal of $1,000,000, an interest rate of 6% pa compounding monthly with a term of 25 years.
Then interest rates suddenly fall to 4.5% 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 2 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 2, which was the 24th payment since the loan was granted. Also assume that rates were and are expected to remain constant.
In the home loan market, the acronym LVR stands for Loan to Valuation Ratio. If you bought a house worth one million dollars, partly funded by an $800,000 home loan, then your LVR was 80%. The LVR is equivalent to which of the following ratios?
Question 904 option, Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing, option on future on stock index
A six month European-style call option on six month S&P500 index futures has a strike price of 2800 points.
The six month futures price on the S&P500 index is currently at 2740.805274 points. The futures underlie the call option.
The S&P500 stock index currently trades at 2700 points. The stock index underlies the futures. The stock index's standard deviation of continuously compounded returns is 25% pa.
The risk-free interest rate is 5% pa continuously compounded.
Use the Black-Scholes-Merton formula to calculate the option price. The call option price now is:
A stock's returns are normally distributed with a mean of 10% pa and a standard deviation of 20 percentage points pa. What is the 95% 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.
The 95% confidence interval of annual returns is between:
Question 963 Bretton Woods, foreign exchange rate, foreign exchange system history, no explanation
Under the Bretton Woods System (1944 to 1971), currencies were priced relative to:
RBA analyst Adam Hamilton wrote in the December 2018 Bulletin article ‘Understanding Exchange Rates and Why They Are Important’ the following passage about bilateral exchange rates:
A bilateral exchange rate refers to the value of one currency relative to another. It is the most commonly referenced type of exchange rate. Most bilateral exchange rates are quoted against the US dollar (USD), as it is the most traded currency globally. Looking at the Australian dollar (AUD), the AUD/USD exchange rate gives you the amount of US dollars that you will receive for each Australian dollar that you convert (or sell). For example, an AUD/USD exchange rate of 0.75 means that you will get US75 cents for every 1 AUD.
An appreciation of the Australian dollar is an increase in its value compared with a foreign currency. This means that each Australian dollar buys you more foreign currency than before. Equivalently, if you are buying an item that is priced in foreign currency it will now cost you less in Australian dollars than before. If there is a depreciation of the Australian dollar, the opposite is true.
Based on this information, which of the following statements is NOT correct?