Which discount rate should a company use to evaluate its projects or to value its assets in general? This note is intended to clarify the different assumptions and formulas used to calculate the WACC that students may encounter in different textbooks and articles.

This case is used in Darden's core first year finance course. The exercise introduces in a fun way the fundamentals of financial policy that are the foundation of corporate finance. It takes the textbook treatment of the Modigliani and Miller (M&M) principles and casts it in a case format. The case is accompanied by a teaching note for instructors and spreadsheets for both instructors and students. Moe Miller, the new managing director of M&M Piz...

This note briefly discusses the versatile and widely-used technique of levering and unlevering beta, which has many and varied applications in finance. The note addresses the intuition and relevant mathematical expressions of this technique, and illustrates its usefulness with a practical application focusing on Starbucks.

In early March 2012, an investor sat at home in Gurgaon, India examining the latest financial information about Apollo Tyres Limited, India’s leading tire manufacturer. Over the past decade, the company had significantly diversified its product and geographic mix through organic investment and strategic acquisitions and had experienced superior growth opportunities. Yet, after almost doubling between 2007 and 2010, its share price had not seen an...

In early 2013, an analyst at an insurance company was examining whether IndusInd Bank, a mid-size bank in India, would be a good investment for the insurance fund’s equity portfolio. From January 2008 until March 30, 2013, the bank’s stock had tripled under its new management. The analyst wondered whether deploying funds in the bank would yield any significant returns. He decided to use the available financial information and the residual income ...

In 2014, an analyst with a leading investment company wanted to evaluate the financial performance of a kitchen appliances company, TTK Prestige Ltd., headquartered in Bangalore, India. To accomplish this task, the analyst decided to use the economic value added (EVA)-based performance measure, which accorded importance to value creation by management for its shareholders. Recently, there had been a shift away from traditional approaches of measu...

This case examines the investment strategy decisions of a student portfolio management team in April 2017. The case is designed to provide a context for an introduction to the intuition of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and practical estimation methods. Students are invited to make investment recommendations based on the risk-return characteristics of a set of stock-investment alternatives. The case discussion surrounds the tension with r...

In 2015, the chief executive officer of Natco Pharma Limited, a commercial manufacturer of pharmaceutical drugs in India, needed to raise funds either through debt or equity to meet the company's capital expenditure and working capital requirements of ₹3.

Central to a firm’s long-term success; is allocating capital so that it generates economic value. The two most common decision rules based on economic value are to (i) accept proposals that have a positive net present value (NPV) when discounted at the appropriate hurdle rate or (ii) to accept proposals whose internal rate of return (IRR) exceeds the appropriate hurdle rate. Key to both rules; in economic terms; the hurdle rate reflects the appro...

Early in 2020, Pamela Taggart, the recently-appointed CFO of Stealth Sports (a non-publicly-trade company), had one overriding task and little time to waste: She needed to estimate a hurdle rate to force some discipline in the decision-making process of the company. Her problem was that unlike some of the companies she had worked for before, Stealth was not publicly traded; that complicated her job but did not make it impossible. This case is des...