Ch 06 Risk and Return
64. Which of the following statements is CORRECT?
If an investor buys enough stocks, he or she can, through diversification, eliminate all of the diversifiable risk
inherent in owning stocks. Therefore, if a portfolio contained all publicly traded stocks, it would be essentially
riskless.
The required return on a firm’s common stock is, in theory, determined solely by its market risk. If the market
risk is known, and if that risk is expected to remain constant, then no other information is required to specify
the firm’s required return.
Portfolio diversification reduces the variability of returns (as measured by the standard deviation) of each
individual stock held in a portfolio.
A security’s beta measures its non-diversifiable, or market, risk relative to that of an average stock.
A stock’s beta is less relevant as a measure of risk to an investor with a well-diversified portfolio than to an
investor who holds only that one stock.
FMTP.EHRH.17.06.06 – LO: 6-6
United States – BUSPROG: Analytic
United States – AK – DISC: Risk and return
United States – OH – Default City – TBA
TYPE: Multiple Choice: Conceptual
65. Which of the following statements is CORRECT?
Diversifiable risk can be reduced by forming a large portfolio, but normally even highly-diversified portfolios
are subject to market (or systematic) risk.
A large portfolio of randomly selected stocks will have a standard deviation of returns that is greater than the
standard deviation of a 1-stock portfolio if that one stock has a beta less than 1.0.
A large portfolio of stocks whose betas are greater than 1.0 will have less market risk than a single stock with
a beta = 0.8.
If you add enough randomly selected stocks to a portfolio, you can completely eliminate all of the market risk
from the portfolio.
A large portfolio of randomly selected stocks will always have a standard deviation of returns that is less than
the standard deviation of a portfolio with fewer stocks, regardless of how the stocks in the smaller portfolio are
selected.