Fill in the blanks in the following passage by choosing the most appropriate term from the following list (some of the terms may be used more than once or not used at all): expected return, financial assets, lower, market value, higher, opportunity cost of capital, real assets, dividend, shareholders.
Shareholders want managers to maximize the ______of their investments. The firm faces a trade-off. Either it can invest its cash in _______or it can give the cash back to in the form of a _______ and they can invest it in _______. Shareholders want the company to invest in _______ only if the _______ is_______ than they could earn for themselves. The return that shareholders could earn for themselves is therefore the _______for the firm.