Merrill Finch's economic forecasting staff has developed probability estimates for the state of the economy, and its security analysts have developed a sophisticated computer program, which was used to estimate the rate of return on each alternative under each state of the economy. High Tech Inc. is an electronics firms; Collections Inc. collects past-due debts; and U.S. Rubber manufactures tires and various other rubber and plastics products. Merrill Finch also maintains a “market portfolio” that owns a market-weighted fraction of all publicly traded stocks; you can invest in that portfolio, and thus obtain average stock market results. Given the situation as described, answer the following questions.
a. (1) Why is the T-bill's return independent of the state of the economy? Do T-bills promise a completely risk-free return?
(2) Why are High Tech's returns expected to move with the economy whereas Collections' are expected to move counter to the economy?
b. Calculate the expected rate of return on each alternative and fill in the blanks on the row for ‘return' in the table above.
c. You should recognize that basing a decision solely on expected returns is only appropriate for risk-neutral individuals. Because your client, like virtually everyone, is risk adverse, the riskiness of each alternative is an important aspect of the decision. One possible measure of risk is the standard deviation of returns.
(1) Calculate this value for each alternative, and fill in the blank on the row for standard deviation in the table.
(2) What type of risk is measured by the standard deviation?
(3) Draw a graph that shows roughly the shape of the probability distributions for High Tech, U.S. Rubber, and T-bills.
d. Suppose you suddenly remembered that coefficient of variation (CV) is generally regarded as being a better measure of stand-alone risk than the standard deviation when the alternatives being considered have widely differing expected returns. Calculate the missing CVs, and fill in the blanks on the row for CV in the table. Does the CV produce the same risk rankings as the standard deviation?
e. Suppose you created a 2-stock portfolio by investing $50,000 in High Tech and $50,000 in Collections.
(1) Calculate the expected portfolio returns, the standard deviation (sp), and the coefficient of variation (CVp) for this portfolio and fill in the appropriate blanks in the table.
(2) How does the riskiness of the 2-stock portfolio compare with the riskiness of the individual stocks if they were held in isolation?