Fight Finance

If the current AUD exchange rate is USD 0.9686 = AUD 1, what is the American terms quote of the AUD against the USD?

Many Australian home loans that are interest-only actually require payments to be made on a fully amortising basis after a number of years.

You decide to borrow $600,000 from the bank at an interest rate of 4.25% pa for 25 years. The payments will be interest-only for the first 10 years (t=0 to 10 years), then they will have to be paid on a fully amortising basis for the last 15 years (t=10 to 25 years).

Assuming that interest rates will remain constant, what will be your monthly payments over the first 10 years from now, and then the next 15 years after that? The answer options are given in the same order.

Which of the following statements about option contracts is NOT correct? For every:

A continuously compounded monthly return of 1% ##(r_\text{cc monthly})## is equivalent to a continuously compounded annual return ##(r_\text{cc annual})## of:

The government spends money on:

• Goods and services such as defence, police, schools, hospitals and roads; and
• Transfer payments (also called welfare) such as the pension, dole, disability support and student support.

When calculating GDP (=C+I+G+X-M), the ‘government spending’ component (G) is supposed to include:

A Queensland farmer grows strawberries in greenhouses and supplies Australian supermarkets all year round. The farmer must decide how often he should contract the truck driver to deliver his strawberries and how many boxes to send on each delivery. The farmer:

• Sells 100,000 boxes of strawberries per year;
• Incurs holding costs (refrigeration and spoilage) of $16 per box per year; and
• Must pay the truck driver delivery fees at $0.20 per box plus a $500 fixed fee per delivery.

Which of the following statements about the Economic Order Quantity is NOT correct?

The arithmetic average continuously compounded or log gross discrete return (AALGDR) on the ASX200 accumulation index over the 24 years from 31 Dec 1992 to 31 Dec 2016 is 9.49% pa.

The arithmetic standard deviation (SDLGDR) is 16.92 percentage points pa.

Assume that the log gross discrete returns are normally distributed and that the above estimates are true population statistics, not sample statistics, so there is no standard error in the sample mean or standard deviation estimates. Also assume that the standardised normal Z-statistic corresponding to a one-tail probability of 2.5% is exactly -1.96.

If you had a $1 million fund that replicated the ASX200 accumulation index, in how many years would the median dollar value of your fund first be expected to lie outside the 95% confidence interval forecast?

A stock has a beta of 1.2. Its next dividend is expected to be $20, paid one year from now.

Dividends are expected to be paid annually and grow by 1.5% pa forever.

Treasury bonds yield 3% pa and the market portfolio's expected return is 7% pa. All returns are effective annual rates.

What is the price of the stock now?

A bank sells a European call option on a non-dividend paying stock and delta hedges on a daily basis. Below is the result of their hedging, with columns representing consecutive days. Assume that there are 365 days per year and interest is paid daily in arrears.

In the last column when there are 55 days left to maturity there are missing values. Which of the following statements about those missing values is NOT correct?