1. What are investment returns? What is the return on an investment that costs $1,000 and is...

Question:

1. What are investment returns? What is the return on an investment that costs $1,000 and is sold after 1 year for $1,100?
2. The expected rates of return and the beta coefficients of the alternatives as supplied by Barney Smith€™s computer program are as follows:

(1) Do the expected returns appear to be related to each alternative€™s market risk?
(2) Is it possible to choose among the alternatives on the basis of the information developed thus far?
Assume that you recently graduated with a major in finance, and you just landed a job as a financial planner with Barney Smith Inc., a large financial services corporation. Your first assignment is to invest $100,000 for a client. Because the funds are to be invested in a business at the end of 1 year, you have been instructed to plan for a 1-year holding period. Further, your boss has restricted you to the investment alternatives shown in the table with their probabilities and associated outcomes. (Disregard for now the items at the bottom of the data; you will fill in the blanks later.) Barney Smith€™s economic forecasting staff has developed probability estimates for the state of the economy, and its security analysts have developed a sophisticated computer program that was used to estimate the rare of return on each alternative under each state of the economy. Alta Industries is an electronics firm; Repo Men Inc. collects past-due debts; and American Foam manufactures mattresses and various other foam products. Barney Smith also maintains an €œindex fund€ that owns a market-weighted fraction of all publicly traded stocks; you can invest in that fund, and thus obtain average stock market results. Given the situation as described, answer the followingquestions.