CALCULATING STOCK PRICES USING REAL-TIME DATA
By walking you through a set of real-time financial data for IBM, this assignment will help you better understand how theoretical stock prices are calculated; and how prices may react to market forces such as risk and interest rates. We will use both the CAPM and the Constant Growth Model (CGM) to arrive at IBM's stock price. To get started, let us do the followings.
1) First, let’s find an estimate of the risk-free rate of interest, krf. To get this, go to www.bloomberg.com , and click on Market Data to find the 10-year Treasury bond rate. Use this interest rate as the risk-free rate. In addition, you also need a value for the market risk premium. We will use an assumed market risk premium of 7.0%.
2) Find an estimate of IBM's beta (β) from the Quicken's website, found at www.quicken.com . Use Quicken's stock symbol lookup function to get IBM's stock symbol. To get the β, go to "Fundamentals". While there, also obtain IBM's current annual dividend and its 3-year growth rate or g.
3) Given above, use the CAPM to calculate IBM's required rate of return or ks.
4) Use the CGM to find the current stock price for IBM. We will call this the theoretical price or Po.
5) Go back to Quicken, and obtain IBM's current stock quote, or P. Compare Po and P. Do you see any differences? Can you explain what factors may be at work for such a difference in the two prices? This section is especially important- with more weight in grading - so you may want to do some study before answering such a question. Explain your thoughts clearly.
6) Now assume the market risk premium has increased from 7.0% to 10%; and this increase is only due to the increased risk in the market. In other words, assume krf and stock’s beta remain the same for this exercise. What will the new price be? Can you explain what happened?
7) Recalculate IBM's stock using the P/E ratio model (pp. 350-1) and the needed info found at Quicken.com. Explain why the present stock price is different from the price arrived at using CGM.