Southeaster Specialty Case Study

15. Investment A has an expected return of $25 million and investment B has an expected return of $5 million. Market risk analysts believe the standard deviation of the return A is $10 million, and for B is $30 million (negative returns are possible here).

You recently purchased a stock that is expected to earn 12% in a booming economy, 8% in a normal economy and lose 5% in a recessionary economy. There is a 15% probability of a boom, a 75% chance of a normal economy, and a 10% chance of a recession. What is your expected rate of return on this stock?

Problem 1: Jonathon Barrs is a manager for Easy Manufacturing, LLC. He wishes to evaluate three possible investments. These investments are for the purchase of new machine tools from Germany, Japan, and a local US manufacturer. The firm earns 10% on its investments and they have a risk index of 5%. The chart below lays out the expected return and expected risks of the three projects.

The coefficient of variation (CV) represents a percentage of standard deviation to the mean and can be calculated by dividing the standard deviation calculated using Equation 2 by the expected value. The equation can be calculated by:

E.g. A combination of investments in Umbrellas and Ice Creams will eliminate the risk of one another, i.e., the low returns from ice creams in rainy season will be compensated by the umbrella sales. High returns in one industry, in this case, always offset low returns in the other to give a positive return with certainty because returns on the two assets are inversely correlated.

E[Rp ] = (1 − wTb )RF,b + wTb E[RTb ] = (1 − 1.1735) × 0.02 + 1.1735 × 0.04386 = 4.80%.

a) In the first set of calculations, the staff used a discount rate of 20%, a five-year time horizon, and ignored taxes and terminal value. What is the relative attractiveness of these three alternatives?

"a. If each project's cost of capital is 12%, which project should be selected? If the cost of capital is 18%, what

Hence, with a payout ratio target of 4.75%, we would get an Expected Return of 6.25%:

In this assignment you will demonstrate your understanding of capital investment techniques by evaluating the following three case studies.

d. What would be the investor 's certainty equivalent return for the optimally chosen combination? 2. Consider an investor who has an asset allocation of 50% in equities and the rest in T-Bills. Suppose the expected rate of return on equities is 10%/year and the standard deviation of the return on equities is 15%/year. T-Bills earn 6%/year. a. What is the implied risk aversion coefficient of the investor?

We can’t figure out the riskiness of the stock by just looking at the expected return. In the case of individual stock, Reynolds at 1.87 is giving a higher return compared to Hasbro at 1.18. We wouldn’t know the riskiness unless we look at the standard deviation or the variance of the stock. By comparing the two, Reynolds has a higher variance and standard deviation and will be more risky.

Q2. Provide a full-page plot of the Capital Allocation Line for the case in Q1. Label the axes and locate cash, D. Equity, D. Bonds, and your optimal complete portfolio clearly on the plot. You may draw this plot by hand.

High Tech and Collections are two other investment alternatives for the client. The expected rate of return is 12.4% for investing in High Tech and 1.0% for Collections. Investors might choose to invest in one of these two depending on how well they predict the economy will do. High Tech has a direct relationship with the movement of the economy. If the market is expected to increase, then this would be a good investment. Collections, however, moves in the opposite direction of the economy. If a decline is expected, then investors would use this as a hedge against the negative movement of the economy.

Finally, when the expected return up to 10 percent, it will result an undiversified and higher risk portfolio whereby dependent based on the higher risk financial assets.