Category Archives: Corporate Finance

NPV Analysis

NPV Analysis What is Discount Rate? The discount rate, in general, is the cost of capital but there might be exceptions to this. So more often than not, we can think of this as the cost of capital for companies that are operating in just one country, or companies that have only one division, or manufacture only one specific… Read More »

Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation As you will remember that cost of capital is the minimum required return on the company’s investments and now we will discuss a little bit about how to build that cost of capital into a rule to decide whether you should go ahead with the project or not. Also, we will discuss the two most widely used… Read More »

The Debt Tax Shield

The Debt Tax Shield Let’s start with the corporate tax rate, and this is just a very brief example that will show you the tax shelter, the tax break that you have when you get debt in your capital structure. No Debt With Debt $200.0 $200.0 $100.0 $100.0 $100.0 $100.0 $0.0 $8.0 $100.0 $92.0 $35.0 $32.0 $65.0… Read More »

What is the Cost of Capital?

What is the Cost of Capital? Corporations and investors need to interact in a market because investors are the ones that provide the capital so that the corporations can invest and produce the goods and services How do investors think about other investments? How they evaluate investments in terms of returns? How they evaluate investments in terms of… Read More »

Diversification of portfolio

Diversification of portfolio What is a diversified portfolio? The lower the correlation between the asset that I bring and the portfolio I already have, the more I stand to gain in terms of diversification. Let us suppose we form two portfolios. Portfolio number one. Here we are going to put the US, and Canada, and Germany, and the UK,… Read More »

Diversification and Correlation

Relationship between Diversification and Correlation Diversification At the heart of diversification is the correlation so we cannot really separate diversification from correlation. You cannot again think about the risk of a portfolio, without thinking the impact of correlation, and that is the relationship between the behaviors of the assets in the portfolio. Now, one or a couple of important… Read More »

Portfolio Correlation coefficient

Correlation Coefficient You can never build a proper portfolio if you ignore the idea of correlation. Because whether and to which degree assets move in sync, or in completely different cycles, is what is going to determine how much you can diversify your portfolio and again, we have not quite defined this concept of diversification just yet. The… Read More »

Portfolio Risk

How to calculate Portfolio Risk? There you have ten years, three assets and let us think of those as annual returns. It does not matter whether these are Dollar returns or Euro returns, whether this is our total returns or just the capital gains. Just think of these are the annual returns of the assets and if you want… Read More »