Slides1 Class3
Slides1 Class3
Jun Pan
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 1 / 13
Outline
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 2 / 13
The Risk that Matters
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 3 / 13
The CAPM
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 4 / 13
Running Regression to Estimate the CAPM β:
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 5 / 13
Two Sources of Uncertainty in a Stock
( )
One is due to its exposure to the market portfolio: β RM t − rf .
▶
▶ The other is idiosyncratic, as captured by the regression residual ϵt .
By construction, the residual of a regression is uncorrelated with the
explanatory variable: cov(RM
t , ϵt ) = 0.
The R-squared tells us how much of GE’s variance can be explained
by the variance in the market portfolio:
β 2 var(RM ) β 2 var(RM )
R-squared = =
var(RGE ) β 2 var(RM ) + var(ϵ)
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 6 / 13
The CAPM α
α is the expected excess stock return, after taking out the reward
associated with the systematic component.
So testing the CAPM pricing formula is the same as testing whether
or not α is zero.
Conversely, if we can construct many portfolios with positive and
statistically significant α’s, then the CAPM pricing formula is under a
severe challenge.
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 7 / 13
Using t-stat
estimate
t-stat =
s.e.
In finance, we often use historical data to estimate financial models.
The model parameters (e.g., α and β) are always estimated with
noise.
The standard errors and t-stat inform us on the precision. We can
then decide whether or not to take the estimates seriously.
As a rule of thumb, we take an estimate seriously if the absolute value
of its t-stat is larger than 1.96:
|t-stat| ≥ 1.96
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 8 / 13
Alpha, Beta, and R-Squared
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 9 / 13
Alpha, Beta, and R-Squared
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 10 / 13
Wall Street’s Search for Alpha
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 11 / 13
Alpha of a Mutual Fund
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 12 / 13
Alpha of Hedge Funds
Financial Markets, Day 1, Class 3 Alpha, Beta and the CAPM Jun Pan 13 / 13