Group Case 1: Ameritrade – Cost of Capital Executive Summary: As a deep-discount brokerage‚ Ameritrade planned to improve its competitive position by price cutting‚ technology enhancements‚ and increased advertising in mid-1997. Before initiating the plan‚ Ameritrade needed know whether the investment returned more than it cost. We were hired to estimate the cost of capital correctly. The key question is to find suitable comparable firms to estimate Ameritrade’s asset beta‚ since it was a recently-listed
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Section 1 1. Determine the drivers of capital Structure. The primary factors that influence a company’s capital-structure decision are: Company size Big firms are likely to be more leveraged than small firms. This is due to the huge capital assets that they posses Management style Management style ranges from aggressive to conservative. Conservative management is less inclined to use debts to increase profits while an aggressive management may try to grow the firm quickly using significant
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alone. Since the company depended on these operations almost wholly‚ any changes involved as per this could have affected them greatly. And that’s why the company’s international exposure hurt AEs during the global economic downturn that began in late 2000. In addition‚ they did not take into consideration that as a global company with operations in countries that are hugely different from the U.S they needed a more sophisticated way to think about risk and the cost of capital around the world
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Lex Service PLC--- Cost of Capital In 1928 Lex Garages Limited‚ at the time of public incorporation‚ had single garage in London.After 60 years‚ Lex Service PLC became a leading company in automotive distribution and leasing in the United Kingdom. In late 1950‚ Lex obtained from Volvo Car Corporation the exclusive franchise to import and distribute Volvo cars in the United Kingdom that ended in1992 four years before the scheduled termination date. This news dropped the share price of Lexto 30%.
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9-204-109 REV: OCTOBER 23‚ 2006 MIHIR DESAI Globalizing the Cost of Capital and Capital Budgeting at AES In June 2003‚ Rob Venerus‚ director of the newly created Corporate Analysis & Planning group at The AES Corporation‚ thumbed through the five-inch stack of financial results from subsidiaries and considered the breadth and scale of AES. In the 12 years since it had gone public‚ AES had become a leading independent supplier of electricity in the world with more than $33 billion in assets
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Executive Summary Wanting to add Nike’s share to her portfolio‚ Kimi Ford asked her new assistant‚ Joanna Cohen‚ to estimate Nike’s cost of capital. Cohen‚ later‚ came up with the cost of capital of 8.4% that was contradicted to Ford’s cost of capital of 12%. This report points out flaws of Cohen’s assumption and recalculates the WACC to obtain the most accurate cost of capital. In the cost of equity calculation‚ we will use CAPM‚ the dividend discount model (DDM)‚ and the earnings capitalization
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Cost of Capital at Ameritrade What factors should Ameritrade management consider when evaluating the proposed advertising program and technology upgrades? Why? Mr. Ricketts believes that his role as CEO is to maximize shareholder value by accepting any project whose expected return on investment is greater than the cost of capital. Therefore‚ the main factors that Ameritrade management should consider are the expected return on investment for the project‚ and how this compares to the project’s
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Capital Expenditure Valuation Methods The payback period is the time it takes for a project or investments cash outflows to be recovered by cash inflows generated from the same project or investment. It is a very simple and commonly used capital budgeting technique. The formula used to compute the payback period is initial investment divided by cash inflow per period. You generally want to choose the investment that provides the shortest payback period‚ because you will get you cash back and it
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Introduction and Background Diageo was formed in 1997 through the merger of two consumer product companies Grand Metropolitan plc and Guinness plc under the strategy of reducing costs through marketing synergies‚ cutting overhead expenses and increasing production and purchasing efficiencies. The new merger wanted to concentrate solely on the beverage alcohol business‚ so it sold its packaged foods (Pillsbury) and fast food (Burger King) businesses. While the mandate for Managing for Value came
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Case Study of Cost of Capital at Ameritrade 1-a How can the CAPM be used to estimate the cost of capital for a real business investment decision? CAPM results can be compared to the best expected rate of return that investor can possibly earn in other investments with similar risks‚ which is the cost of capital. Under the CAPM‚ the market portfolio is a well-diversified‚ efficient portfolio representing the non-diversifiable risk in the economy. Therefore‚ investments have similar risk if they
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