Theme 1:
1. Find a company stock that has at least 5 years of quarterly return data (60 data points). Determine what the company Beta is by running a regression, and compare your calculation with what the financial source is reporting for the Beta.
2. Is your calculation of Beta the same as what the financial source reports? If not, why could there be a difference?
Theme 2:
1. For the company that you chose in Theme 1, see if you can find data that could be used to calculate a WACC for the company. Typically, this information can be found on the company's website (financial statements, etc.) and stock rating services. After you have calculated the WACC, share your work with your colleagues on the discussion forum. Describe how you collected the information (where you went to collect it), and how you actually calculated the WACC; show your work.
Theme 3:
1. Describe some ideas for how you could go about calculating a discount rate if you weren't able to calculate a Beta.
2. Discuss the pros and cons to different methods and what would be appropriate for certain types of situations.
3. How would you work with a scenario that requires the valuation of a project in a Third-World country (assuming that the headquarters of the company is in the United States)? What things would you consider in the valuation process?
4. Choose two countries from the African and Asian continents. Discuss how you would value companies (or individual projects) across both. Would you value a project the same or differently? Describe the logic of your approach.