2:30
Together that's what we call the risk premium and the risk premium is well of
course beyond, expecting compensation for the expected loss of purchasing power.
If I'm going to bear some risk, I want some extra compensation so the CAPM.
Is basically a model that tells you,
how you actually calculate the raised premium for a specific company.
Now, what is the MRP times beta?
Well, the MRP is the market risk premium, as we said before.
And that is sort of a historical difference,
between the return of equity and the return of debt.
And so year over year, you look at the return of equities in the market,
you look at the return of government debt, and you subtract one from the other.
And if you do that over, and over, and over, and
over again, you can calculate in some sort of average of that.
What is that average?
Well, it gives you an idea.
Of how much more return,
have investors required from investing in equity than from investing in debt?
And that number as we'll see, you know, in the U.S. the typical number is
somewhere between five and 6% and the typical interpretation is that.
Historically people have required about five percent of or six percent more,
to invest in equities as opposed to in investing risk free at government debt.
That is what market risk premium is.
But now you could say well but wait a minute.
I'm not investing just in equities.
I'm investing in this particular company, and
that's where beta actually comes in and that's why,
as you see, the beta has an i because now we're talking about a specific company.
And that company, remember what beta is all about.
That company might magnify or mitigate, the markets fluctuation.
So everything else equal.
The more that a company magnifies market fluctuations,
the more return that you're going to require.
And the more a company mitigates market fluctuations,
the less return that you're going to require.
Now look again at the expression, and notice that Rf and MRP, they don't
have a subscript i, that basically means that if you look at the cost of equity,
of Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, GE, all those companies will, will be using the same Rf.
And we will be using the same MRP.
The only thing that is going to change as we go from company to company is
the beta of the company, so on the right-hand side of the CAPM expression.
What we have only one component that is a specific for
the company that we are looking at.
The other two are common to all the companies, that we may be looking at.
So at the end of the day, the CAPM is a very intuitive model that says,
that the required return on putting your money in this specific company,
is going to depend on, first requiring a return from not losing purchasing power,
but on top of that, requiring a return from bearing risk.
First of investing in equities and
second from investing in the equity of this specific company,
when you put all that together then you get the expression from the CAPM.
Now this brief intuition of the CAPM that I just gave you very quickly is,
is developed a little, a little bit more detail in one of
the technical notes that is going to accompany this particular session.
But you, you, you see where we're going with this.
What we're, we're going to require in return.
That the depends on not losing purchasing power, and depends on bearing risk.
And that is what the CAPM is at the end of the day.
Now, this seems to be very clear.
And it seems that well it's going to be easy to calculate this with a CAPM,
because I just need to throw three numbers into that expression and I'm done.
But as they say the devil is in the details once we ask the question.
So what is RF?
What is MRP, and what is beta that are very many different ways in which we.
We, we, we could actually these numbers.
That is where, remember from the very beginning of the session.
When we said that there are some arguable issues.
This is a very arguable one.
And I'm going to show you some possibilities now.
But, there are many different ways of thinking how, what number we can put
into RF, what number we can put into MRP, and what number we can put into beta.
Whereas, on the side of debt, the fact that we need to use the yield to maturity,
as opposed to the interest rate.
And that is one of those undisputable issues.
Just about everybody would agree that that is the way to go.
Not everybody agrees on what are the exact numbers that we need to
put on a CAPM expression.
That's why.
This is just a,
a, an article that was published in the Harvard Business Review not long ago and
it's asking executives the question of, whether you know your cost of capital?
And it's posing that question simply because, there so
many uncertainties on the way of calculating.
Not only the cost of capital, but particularly the, the cost of equity.
Just to give you a glimpse of this, and I don't want to confuse you.
Just want to give you an idea that this is less a stride forward than it seems to be.
This is when you ask people around,
again these are surveys of practitioners using the model.
Look at the possibilities for the risk-free rate.
Some people use gov, everybody uses government bonds.
But the question is for how long, what is the maturity of those government bonds.
So there you have a people that use three month treasury bonds.
Some other people that use one year, five years, ten years, 20 years, or 30 years.
As you see they are the most popular option with 46% of users, almost 50%.
It's a ten year bond.
And that is typically indeed the most typical option.
But as you see you know, there are people that actually beg to disagree.
And there are people that use longer maturities, and
people that use shorter maturities.
That's what I mean.
By saying well it's very easy to understand to rationalize what
the risk-free rate means in the context of the require rate on an equity, and
in the context of the CAPM, but
it's much more difficult to put a specific number to that most people would agree.
That ten ten year bond yield to maturity is the number we should use, but,
as you see many other people would use other possibilities.
And again this is not to confuse you.
This is just to show you that, that our differences of opinion and
that this is much more arguable than many of the things that we discussed before.
This is for the.
Market risk premium, or the equity risk premium.
And as you see there these are specific number for the U.S. market.
Let me make just a quick point here.
When you look at different numbers, these numbers might change dramatically.
In other words remember what the market risk premium is.
Is the extra compensation required by investors for
investing in equity as opposed to investing risk free government debt.
Well that extra compensation doesn't have to be the same across countries.
And the data actually showed that maybe very different across countries.
So the numbers that you're seeing there are from the U.S. and
as you see there, the range between five and six percent is very popular.
About half the people use that range.
But as you also see, some people actually use higher numbers.
And some people actually use lower numbers.
Again.
It's very difficult to argue that you're right and
I'm wrong, depending on what our views are the only thing that we can do
when it comes down to the CAPM, is just look around us.
And see what people tend to do, what are the most popular options as opposed to
saying this is the way it should go, and everything else is actually wrong.
Finally on the beta, and, and
beta remember this is basically, we need to look back to estimate beta.
And one of the questions.
There are many questions on the estimation of beta, but
one of the questions is, so how many years are we going to go back?
And as you see there, you know, the,
the five year estimation period is very popular.
But, it's not the only one.
Some people estimate betas with one year, some people with two years, some
people with three years, and some people do something else altogether different,
so again, five years seems to be a popular estimation period, but
it doesn't have to be and it's not actually the only one.
Where does five years come from?
Well, some people will tell you, ideally we would like to go more years back to
capture whether the company magnifies or mitigates other markets' fluctuation.
But here is where, you know,
a practitioner can help you a little bit thinking about these issues.
Because the company might have changed a lot over time, and
if the company did change a lot over time, and you go back many,
many years you're picking up information that is no longer relevant.
Case in point think about telecommunication companies in Europe in
the early nineties that was when all the telecommunications market was
being deregulated.
So if I had stood here in 1995, and I had looked at
the beta of Deutsche Telekom, or France Telecom, or Telefonica Spain, and
I would have gone back 20 or 30 years to calculate that beta.
But, I would use that beat looking ahead than I
would be basically picking up information that is totally relevant.
Because 20, 30 years before 19 95 all the telecommunications companies
were monopolies, were a state owned, they had only one product.
And back in 1995, and looking ahead then, the, the business changed completely.
There was competition, there was different lines of business with cellular phones and
so forth, and so, you know, if you go many years back,
you'll run the risk of picking up a lot of information that data,
that is no longer relevant when you start looking ahead.
And at the end of the day we always want to look ahead.
Now the, the other alternative is to look just a little bit back.
But of course, the problem with looking just a little bit back with a few months,
or one year, or maybe even two, the problem is
that the company might have done spectacularly well or spectacularly awful.
And you don't want to actually take that little bit of information and
predict it maybe five, ten, 15, 20 years forward.
And so, you know, between not going too far back, and
not going too little back appears this sort of
compromise of going back five years, and that is why it's a popular option.
Now all that being said, what is important about these graphs that I just showed you,
is that there are differences of opinion.
Not everybody agrees, on what is the best way to.
Estimate a risk free rate, a market risk premium, and a beta.
Now we have one final thing and we're done.
And then we'll actually get to on the next session to to estimate an actual cost of
capital, but remember.
We call it technically the weighted average cost of capital, and
that means that we need to take into account the proportions.
How much we're using each of the different sources of financing?
How much debt we're using, and how much equity we're, we're using?
And those proportions are the one that in terms of notation we said before that
we're going to denote with x.
So xD is a proportion of debt.
xE is the proportion of, of equity.
And remember we're also calling D and E stand for debt and equity.
So xD and xE, if there are the only two sources of
financing that a company's going to use, if we use part of debt and part of equity,
when we put them together, that's all the capital that we have to invest.
In other words,
we're mathematically putting that, is that xD plus xE must be equal to 1.
And so the question now is a question of proportions.
Of all my capital, what proportion I'm using in terms of debt, and
what proportion I'm using in terms of In terms of equity.
So these are very simple definitions.
D divided D plus E is xD.
E divided D plus E is xE.
And the sum of these two things must be equal to 1.
And then we're going to put specific numbers,
in the next session to these two proportions.
One final thing and we'll be done with this.
Sometimes a question comes up, what type of debt we need to consider?
And here this is more or less quote unquote undisputable.
That most of the time we do not look at short term debt.
We do not look at the debt that a company uses to run the day-to-day operations.
Basically we're looking when we estimate the cost of capital, we're looking at
long-term debt, the debt that we'll raise in order to make long-term investments.
And sometimes that's not exactly, I mean, there's sort of a gray line here.
But typically that is interest bearing debt.
So some people would tell you,
well what you need to take into account is interest bearing debt.
What you need to take into account is long-term debt.
Most of the time these two things are the same.
There may be some examples, or
some specific cases in which that is not the case.
But debt for which we pay a, a specific interest.
A, an explicit interest.
And long term debt.
These two things actually have a lot of overlapping, and
that is the type of debt that we consider to estimate the the, the cost of capital.
Final thing and
we'll go back to this, when we estimate the numbers in session four.
Now we could use book values or
market values to calculate the proportions of debt and equity.
How much debt, how much equity, and what proportions we have?
Well typically here that is one of those sort of almost undisputed issues,
that we need to use market values as opposed to book values.
And if you think for a minute.
About what we discussed about the cost of debt you realize why.
And if, if you remember the market prices that people are willing to pay for
those bonds fluctuate with the riskiness of the company.
So if we want to properly reflect,
how much we have capital in terms of capital invested today,
that is going to be depending on market values as opposed to book values.
In other words, if I wanted to get rid of my debt by buying the debt in the market,
then what I pay in the market is the market value, and
is not the book value of the debt.
So because the market value, is the one that is going to reflect everything we
know about the company today, when we calculate how much debt we have, how much
equity we have and the proportions of the two, we use market values not book values.
So, this is just about it for session three.
We're going to, before we start session four, we're going to do a little review of
the main concepts that we have discussed today and then we're going to jump
right on, and estimate the cost of capital of Starbucks by the end of the year 2030.
See you soon.
[MUSIC]