CAPM Case Study

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Generally, investors seek to be compensated in two ways: time value of money and risk. The time value of money is expressed by risk-free (rf) rate in the formula as shown in Figure 2, it compensates investors for putting capital in investments over a period of time. The formula also calculates the amount of return an investor should expect for taking an additional risk. The model relies on a risk multiplier called the beta coefficient, that compares the returns of an asset to the market over a duration to the market premium (Rm-rf). Simply put, the CAPM states that investors can expect to obtain a risk-free rate along with a ‘market risk premium’ multiplied by their amount of risk exposure (Dempsey, 2012).
It is essential to understand the …show more content…

In order for CAPM to be valid, numerous assumptions were made by William Sharpe. CAPM assumptions are criticized to be unrealistic when compared to the actual stock market. Although there are several assumptions and implications on CAPM, the three main assumptions were addressed in "Corporate Finance" by Watson & Head (2010). The three assumptions as follows: (1) The market is frictionless, therefore there are no transaction costs, taxes, limitations, or troubles with the invisibility of assets.; (2) All investors myopic and own diversified portfolios with a single-period transaction range; (3) Investments are confined to openly traded assets where investors are allowed to borrow and lend unlimitedly at a risk-free rate. In this assumption, assets such as human capital are not included as part of the investment opportunity set. The first major hypotheses of the CAPM is its assumption that the markets are frictionless with no transaction costs, thus assuming that trading requires zero expenditure and investments are valued to drop on the capital exchange line. In reality, investments include activity such as the acquisition of a business or another organization, which involves a large volume of transaction costs. Moreover, under CAPM, investment trading is tax-free and interests …show more content…

In Dempsey’s (2012) 'The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM): The History Of A Failed Revolutionary Idea In Finance?', it is argued that the CAPM fails as a paradigm for asset pricing. Due to the many questions and doubts that were brought about on the CAPM, Fama and French (2004) had included a few more add on to make the model of CAPM a better fit. However, this means that the model is being developed to fit the data, this causes a lot of the intuition of the model to be desired. Dempsey (2015) mentioned that the CAPM has not been quite successful in modeling the past share prices movement. Tests have been conducted to compare the model of CAPM with the history of past share price movement, and it is shown to not provide a good fit. Furthermore, empirical analysis indicated a risk-free rate that was greater than the existing one (Kürschner, 2008). In addition, there were early tests of the CAPM which indicated that greater share returns were commonly associated with higher betas. These results were taken as proof to support the model of CAPM while parts of the findings that contradicted the CAPM to be a fitting model of asset pricing did not discourage any interest for the model (Douglas 1967). To add on, the CAPM assumes that risk is estimated with the standard deviation of an asset's systematic risk, comparative to the standard deviation of the market of its own (Roll, 1977). Even though the

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