P/E ratios are one of the tools most widely-used by analysts and the key variable in many value strategies. PEG ratios, an increasingly-popular valuation tool among analysts, improve upon P/E ratios by adjusting the latter by growth. This article proposes a new tool, the PERG ratio, that adjusts...

For over 30 years academics and practitioners have been debating the merits of the CAPM. One of the characteristics of this model is that it measures risk by beta, which follows from an equilibrium in which investors display mean-variance behavior. In that framework, risk is assessed by the...

The most widely-used measure of an asset's risk, beta, stems from an equilibrium in which investors display mean-variance behavior. This behavioral criterion assumes that portfolio risk is measured by the variance (or standard deviation) of returns, which is a questionable measure of risk. The...

Recent empirical evidence has established that a measure ofdownside risk, the semideviation with respect to the mean, explains the cross section of stock returns in emerging markets, and is a plausible variable to be used in a CAPM-type model to compute costs of equity. The evidence reported in...

Every company evaluating an investment project or an acquisition in an emerging market must not only estimate future cash flows but also an appropriate discount rate. Although not free from controversy, the cost of equity in developed markets is typically estimated with the CAPM. In emerging...

The assumption that daily stock returns are normally distributed has long been disputed by the data. In this article we test (and clearly reject) the normality assumption using time seriesof daily stock returns for thirteen European securities markets. More importantly, we fit to the data four...

The assumption that stock prices follow a random walk has critical implications for investors and firms. Among those implications is the fact that data frequencies and investment horizons are irrelevant (as defined below) when evaluating the risk of a security. However, if stock prices do not...

Do investors in emerging markets obtain their long term returns smoothly and steadily over time, or is their long term performance largely determined by the return of just a few outliers? Are investors likely to successfully predict the best days to be in and out of these markets? The evidence...

Beta as a measure of risk has been under fire for many years. Although practitioners still widely use the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity, they are aware of its problems and looking for alternatives. A possible alternative is to estimate the cost of equity based on the semideviation, a...

The standard deviation, arguably the most widely-used measure of risk, suffers from at least two limitations. First, the number itself offers little insight; after all, what is the intuition behind the square root of the average quadratic deviation from the arithmetic mean return? Second,...