184153241 ADL 13 Financial Management V

Fama and French’s three factor model attempts to explain the variation of stock prices through a multifactor model that includes a size factor and BE/ME factor in addition to the beta risk factor. Fama-French model essentially extended the CAPM (which breaks up cause of variation of stock price into systematic risk which is non-diversifiable and idiosyncratic risk which is diversifiable) by introducing these two additional factors. Fama and French find that stocks with high beta didn’t have consistently higher returns than stocks with low beta and this indicates that beta was not a useful measure under their model. Their model is based on research findings that sensitivity of movements of the size and BE/ME factor constituted risk, and

The table below shows the equity betas for the firms presented in the case (using Jan-92 to Dec-96 equal weight NYSE/AMEX/NASDAQ as market portfolio):

All operations within an organisation must be viable through legislation. Legislation often constrains just how much information an organisation can have and the manner in which it can be used. Legislation exists to protect both employee and employer from unfair conduct. Legislation is a law which has been produced by the government. Legislation exists to authorise access to particular files, to sanction individuals who do not abide by guidelines set, to restrict how much information can be given, etc. For example, employees must have a formally written contract of employment prior to commencing work with a company. It protects employees against unfair dismissal and states that a redundancy pay must be paid if the

The historical beta comes from historical data. This kind of beta would slope coefficient in a regression, and associated with company's stock returns and market returns. This approach is conceptually straightforward, and complications quickly arise in practice.

* Stock Beta: Exhibit 5 shows a detailed measurement of the company’s stock returns in relation to the rest of the market through 5-year historical price and index data. The analysis includes monthly returns of both the NYSE and the S&P 500 index in order to capture a comprehensive view of the market return. In each comparison, the monthly returns of the Target stock and market are plotted on Y-axis and X-axis respectively to get the regression line’s slope or beta. The analysis arrives at an average beta of 0.988 which indicates a similar movement of Target stock’s returns in comparison to the whole market over time.

What is the implied average collection period for the end of March? For the end of June?

Describe the social implications of business ethics facing Marks and Spencer in its different areas of activity.

The regression that we performed in excel for both stocks yielded a beta of .73576 for Reynolds, and a beta of 1.4198 for Hasbro. In question 2 we learned that although Reynolds stock was riskier independently, adding it to the portfolio made it more diversified compared to adding Hasbro, due to the fact that it was less correlated to the market portfolio. Beta is a measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of a security or a portfolio in comparison to the market as a whole. Therefore, since the beta of Reynolds is lower than Hasbro, our beta calculations align with the fact that Reynolds stock makes the overall portfolio less risky. This finding is also intuitive when considering the nature of the companies; Reynolds is a Tobacco company meaning that is should be less sensitive to changes in market conditions than a toy company like Hasbro.

In the Fama & French paper, they found that: 1) stocks with high beta did not have consistently higher returns than low-beta stocks; 2)

Cost of Equity = Risk free rate + (Market return – risk free rate) X beta

2. Compares the returns of the asset to the market over a period of time (Beta)

We use the equation ri=(Pt-Pt-1+Dt)/Pt-1 to calculate the monthly return of stock of Charles Schwab Corp, Quick & Reilly Group and Waterhouse Investor Srvcs. Then we have two methods to calculate the Beta of Equity for each company.

Beta: Companies in the same industries usually have different betas, one of the reasons this can happen is the kind of financing or debt equity ratio. The higher the debt equity ratio the higher the beta: this shows why company N has a higher beta compared to company M that has a lower debt equity ratio.

Of these 6 comparable companies, 3 of them are kitchen and bath companies and the rest 3 deals with engines and generators. Hence an average of the asset beta has been taken for these two sub groups which represent different business segments. Finally to arrive at the asset beta which would reflect the riskiness/volatility of Kohler, weighted average of these two betas has been taken as provided in the calculations below:

by x%, the portfolio changes by x*beta%  market value of the market representation product used for short selling