Investment and Market Risk Premium

For the purpose of calculating the net present value of the project, an appropriate cost of capital has to be calculated at which free cash flows of the project should be discounted. Since the project will be solely financed by selling new shares, cost of equity will be used as the discount rate. Beta for the company can be assumed to be equal to average of the betas of the competitors of the company. This average beta value comes out to be 1.2. Risk free rate is 0.17% while risk premium has been estimated to be 6%. Thus by putting these values in CAPM formula, we can find the cost of equity for the company which is 7.39%.

The purpose is that the cost capital will be used for capital budgeting, financial accounting, performance assessment, stock repurchases estimations. Also the cost of capital is a necessary basis for the expected growth and forecasted demand.

We are interested in obtaining the asset beta for Collinsville investment. Here from the reading material, we find there were altogether 6 chemical companies that produce sodium chlorates. They are Hooker, Pennwalt, American, Kerr-McGee, Brunswick and Southern. However, since we are evaluating the addition of a sodium chlorate plant, the two firms (Brunswick and Southern) who specialize in producing sodium chlorate are likely the best “twins”. To determine the asset betas of each company, we

The comparable firm should exhibit similar business fundamentals in terms assets, business model, and risk. As such, we think that other major discount brokerages (Charles Schwab, Quick & Reilly, and Waterhouse) should be used as comparable firms to calculate equity and asset betas.

Here we choose VW NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ data as market returns, because it’s value weighted and more reliable. The results show CSC’s equity beta = 2.27, QRG’s equity beta = 1.79.

* 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.

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.

The senior management of Company A employ you to advise them on the cost of capital the company should use to calculate net present value and decide whether or not to undertake a new investment project. You may assume that the new project is comparable to the average of the company’s existing projects in all respects.

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.

A common practice to determine the firm’s beta is to draw from historical data from published sources or compare numbers to competitors. In this case, Heinz can compare to Kraft, Campbell Soup and Del Monte and use professional judgement in determining the stock’s sensitivity to the market. A stock’s beta can be determined using a formula as well.

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:

What factors should Ameritrade Management consider when evaluating the proposed advertising program and technology upgrades? Why?

In order to answer the question a numerical example will be provided. In table 2 the original data are reproduced (Ceramic Coatings product of percentage of corporate assets times estimated divisional beta => 0,10 * 0,95 = 0,095 => this reduces weighted average corporate beta to 0,795).

The overall method used to calculate the expected value of the net present value of the project is to first calculate the real weighted average cost of capital of the firm, use the