Fight Finance

A retail furniture company buys furniture wholesale and distributes it through its retail stores. The owner believes that she has some good ideas for making stylish new furniture. She is considering a project to buy a factory and employ workers to manufacture the new furniture she's designed. Furniture manufacturing has more systematic risk than furniture retailing.

Her furniture retailing firm's after-tax WACC is 20%. Furniture manufacturing firms have an after-tax WACC of 30%. Both firms are optimally geared. Assume a classical tax system.

Which method(s) will give the correct valuation of the new furniture-making project? Select the most correct answer.

A project has the following cash flows. Normally cash flows are assumed to happen at the given time. But here, assume that the cash flows are received smoothly over the year. So the $105 at time 2 is actually earned smoothly from t=1 to t=2:

What is the payback period of the project in years?

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:

The financing decision primarily affects which part of a business?

The below screenshot of Microsoft's (MSFT) details were taken from the Google Finance website on 28 Nov 2014. Some information has been deliberately blanked out.

What was MSFT's approximate payout ratio over the last year?

Note that MSFT's past four quarterly dividends were $0.31, $0.28, $0.28 and $0.28.

A stock just paid a dividend of $1. Future annual dividends are expected to grow by 2% pa. The next dividend of $1.02 (=1*(1+0.02)^1) will be in one year, and the year after that the dividend will be $1.0404 (=1*(1+0.02)^2), and so on forever.

Its required total return is 10% pa. The total required return and growth rate of dividends are given as effective annual rates.

Calculate the current stock price.

Judging by the graph, in 2018 the USD short term interest rate set by the US Federal Reserve is higher than the JPY short term interest rate set by the Bank of Japan, which is higher than the EUR short term interest rate set by the European central bank.

At the latest date shown in 2018: ##r_{USD}>r_{JPY}>r_{EUR}##

Assume that each currency’s yield curve is flat at the latest date shown in 2018, so interest rates are expected to remain at their current level into the future.

Which of the following statements is NOT correct?

Over time you would expect the:

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:

Arthur and Bindi are the only people on a remote island.

Luckily there are Coconut and Date palm trees on the island that grow delicious fruit. The problem is that harvesting the fruit takes a lot of work.

Arthur can pick 1 coconut per hour, 4 dates per hour or any linear combination of coconuts and dates. For example, he could pick 0.5 coconuts and 2 dates per hour.

Bindi can pick 2 coconuts per hour, 1 date per hour or any linear combination. For example, she could pick 0.5 coconuts and 0.75 dates per hour.

This information is summarised in the table and graph:

Which of the following statements is NOT correct?