With respect to the comments of Stiles and McCracken concerning for whom the GDP Fund would be

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With respect to the comments of Stiles and McCracken concerning for whom the GDP Fund would be appropriate:
a. McCracken was correct and Stiles was wrong.
b. Both were correct.
c. Stiles was correct and McCracken was wrong.

Orb Trust (Orb) has historically leaned toward a passive management style of its portfolios. The only model that Orb’s senior management has promoted in the past is the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Now Orb’s management has asked one of its analysts, Kevin McCracken, CFA, to investigate the use of the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) model.
McCracken believes that a two-factor APT model is adequate, where the factors are the sensitivity to changes in real GDP and changes in inflation. McCracken has concluded that the factor risk premium for real GDP is 8% while the factor risk premium for inflation is 2%. He estimates for Orb’s High Growth Fund that the sensitivities to these two factors are 1.25 and 1.5, respectively. Using his APT results, he computes the expected return of the fund. For comparison purposes, he then uses fundamental analysis to also compute the expected return of Orb’s High Growth Fund.
McCracken finds that the two estimates of the Orb High Growth Fund’s expected return are equal.
McCracken asks a fellow analyst, Sue Kwon, to provide an estimate of the expected return of Orb’s Large Cap Fund based on fundamental analysis. Kwon, who manages the fund, says that the expected return is 8.5% above the risk-free rate. McCracken then applies the APT model to the Large Cap Fund. He finds that the sensitivities to real GDP and inflation are .75 and 1.25, respectively.
McCracken’s manager at Orb, Jay Stiles, asks McCracken to compose a portfolio that has a unit sensitivity to real GDP growth but is not affected by inflation. McCracken is confident in his APT estimates for the High Growth Fund and the Large Cap Fund. He then computes the sensitivities for a third fund, Orb’s Utility Fund, which has sensitivities equal to 1.0 and 2.0, respectively. McCracken will use his APT results for these three funds to accomplish the task of creating a portfolio with a unit exposure to real GDP and no exposure to inflation. He calls the fund the “GDP Fund.” Stiles says such a GDP Fund would be good for clients who are retirees who live off the steady income of their investments. McCracken says that the fund would be a good choice if upcoming supply side macroeconomic policies of the government are successful.

Capital Asset Pricing Model
The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) describes the relationship between systematic risk and expected return for assets, particularly stocks. The CAPM is a model for pricing an individual security or portfolio. For individual securities, we make use of the security market line (SML) and its...
Expected Return
The expected return is the profit or loss an investor anticipates on an investment that has known or anticipated rates of return (RoR). It is calculated by multiplying potential outcomes by the chances of them occurring and then totaling these...
Portfolio
A portfolio is a grouping of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies and cash equivalents, as well as their fund counterparts, including mutual, exchange-traded and closed funds. A portfolio can also consist of non-publicly...
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Investments

ISBN: 9780073530703

9th Edition

Authors: Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, Alan J. Marcus

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