preview

Benefits Of Barclays Bank : Viewing Principles Of Finance At Work

Decent Essays

Barclays Bank: Viewing Principles of Finance at Work

Introduction

Banking success is all about sustained profitability through the application of robust scientific investments and trading strategies. The premier position that Barclays enjoyed in the financial industry for over 3 centuries is a validation of the fact that it was built on the strong principles of finance. However, the last couple of decades have seen erosion in its reputation due to the breaching of those very principles.

Barclays Bank is one of the biggest British multi-national banks headquartered in London with a market capitalization of over 21 billion pounds. Its total assets are 1312 billion pounds. The net income and profits are under pressure and have been …show more content…

These are the divisions in Barclays that handle markets and involved in trading of stocks, bonds, commodities, forex, interest rates and market indexes. Trading in derivatives is commonly employed by Barclays to hedge risks but we will see that the fund managers in the last decades exposed the bank to risks by indulging in huge speculative investments. Let us investigate a few financial principles now.

Capital Assets Pricing Model (CAPM)

CAPM is a highly acclaimed theory of risk and return for securities in a competitive capital market. The path breaking theory won Sharpe, Markowitz, and Miller the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1990. CAPM establishes the Beta coefficient as a measure of the systematic risk of an asset. The systematic risk is also known as market risk. This risk cannot be eliminated. This systematic risk is uncontrollable. The unsystematic risks include the risk that influences a single company or a small group of company and the same is controllable and can be mitigated through diversification.

Assets with Betas larger than 1.0 are riskier than average. Since they have larger risks, they will also have larger expected revenues. Barclays earlier had a beta of around 2.3 and hence applying CAPM, we could predict that if the market index return raised by 10 percent the returns on Barclays’s shares would tend to rise by 23 % and vice versa. Traditionally the financial industry has a Beta of 1 and the banking sector

Get Access