Essay on Financial Theory Discussion and Analysis

Horizontal analysis allows side by side comparisons on a year to year basis to determine the performance from one year to the next. The company decides on standards to compare the results of the analysis. Standards are researched by checking competitors, internet research of general industry guidelines or standards created from past experience in the company.

In this literate review the most important papers about explaining stock returns from 1952, when Markowitz came up with Modern Portfolio Theory, till around 2011 will be discussed. As stated in Chapter 2, Jack Treynor was one of the first economists that started to work on the CAPM model. When he developed the CAPM in 1961, there was no way yet to fully test it. Because there were no samples large enough or of sufficient quality, the real testing of the CAPM started in 1970. In 1973, the world was shown the famous Black and Scholes options pricing model. One of the first studies that gave a different answer than the CAPM was the research by Basu (1977). While he agrees with the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Basu reaches another

A firm can change its beta through managerial decisions, including capital budgeting and capital structure decisions.

The overall rate of default is critical because of its compounding increase in liabilities with

Financial theory accepts the belief that a share’s return should be proportional to the risk received by its holder. There is a need of a risk-return equilibrium model. Since the nativity of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), an equilibrium model was only the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The CAPM constitutes of two types of returns, the risk free rate of returns of the Treasury bills and beta times the return on the market portfolio. The following equation is the basis of this model:

CAPM results can be compared to the best expected rate of return that investor can possibly earn in other investments with similar risks, which is the cost of capital. Under the CAPM, the market portfolio is a well-diversified, efficient portfolio representing the non-diversifiable risk in the economy. Therefore, investments have similar risk if they have the same sensitivity to market risk, as measured by their beta with the market portfolio.

This essay will highlight the use of Capital asset pricing model ( CAPM ) to be considered as a pricing theory model for assets . CAPM model helps investors to analyse the risk and what expectation to keep from an investment (Banz , 1981) . There are two types of risk

In light of these, the author noted the great importance of the proper usage of an asset pricing model and the estimation of the cost of capital. Necessary assessments of cost of capital which are used to evaluate the quality of investment, market efficiency, and financial assets were needed. As such the proper usage of these asset pricing models can help to prevent wrong investment projects and inadequate selling and acquiring of shares; and ensure market and economic smoothness.

future performances and ends with the choice of portfolio. This paper is concerned with the

The company’s objective is to improve its competitive position in deep-discount brokerage. In order to achieve this objective, the company must grow its customer base, requiring an investment of $100 million to upgrade its technological capabilities as well as an increase of $155 million for its advertisement budget. In order to evaluate the company’s cost of capital, we used the Cost Asset Pricing Model. Since the company went public recently, it would not be an accurate assessment of the risk of

For estimation of betas, the above equation was run for the period from Jan, 2003 to Dec, 2006. Based on the estimated betas we have divided the sample of 63 stocks into 10 portfolios each comprising of 6 stocks except portfolio no.1, 5 and 10 having seven stocks each. The first portfolio 1 has the 7 lowest beta stocks and the last portfolio 10 has the 7 highest beta stocks. The rationale for forming portfolios is to reduce measurement error in the betas.

The analysis of this paper will derive the validity of the Fama and French (FF) model and the efficiency of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The comparison of the Fama and French Model and CAPM (Sharpe, 1964 & Lintner, 1965) uses real time data of stock market to practise its efficacy. The implication of the function in realistic conditions would justify the utility of the CAPM theory. The theory suggests that the expected return demanded by investors on a risky asset depends on the risk-free rate of interest, the expected return on the market portfolio, the variance of the return on the market portfolio, and

During this time period, prices for the stocks increase substantially, accordingly reducing risk premium demanded by the traders. Also, shares should amount from 30 to 55 percent of the entire investment portfolio to optimize the investor’s expected profitability. Proximity of the evaluated results to the reality reveals excellence of the myopic loss aversion model (Siegel and Thaler, 1997).

Richard Roll, and University and Auburn, University of Washington, and University of Chicago educated economist, began his career researching the effect of major events of stock prices. This experience likely helped him reach the two conclusions he makes in his 1977 “A Critique Of The Asset Pricing Theory’s Tests”, one of the earliest and most influential arguments against CAPM. In the paper, Roll makes two major claims: that CAPM is actually a redundant equation that just further proves the concept of mean-variance efficiency, and that it is impossible to conclusively prove CAPM. His first claim relates to mean-variance efficiency: the idea that mathematically one must be able to create a portfolio that offers the most return for a given amount of risk. Roll claims that all CAPM is doing is testing a portfolio’s mean variance efficiency, and not actually modeling out projected future returns. The second claim in the paper is that there is not enough data about market returns for CAPM to ever prove conclusive. Even if modern technologies could help alleviate some of the burden of testing market returns for publicly traded equities, there is still no way to account for the returns of less liquid markets, where there is less public information. This means it is impossible for

We use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to determine the cost of equity. As