Monday, November 9, 2009

CONTEST: Free Lunch / Dinner at Sushi On Bloor

I was thinking of (deliberately tricky) questions that might get asked in investment banking interviews and I created this one myself:

What is the theoretical value of a company's stock that:
  • has earnings of $1.50 per share,
  • Dividend payout ratio of 33%,
  • has a perpetual earnings growth rate of 9%,
  • Cost of equity of 9%,
  • After-tax Cost of debt of 5%, and
  • Financial Leverage of 2.1x
Hint (Question Variant): What would its PE ratio be?

First person who comments on this blog post with the right answer wins a free lunch / dinner at Sushi on Bloor on me. If you are outside of Toronto, we can think of some other prize of approximately equivalent value (let's say $20 CND).

Comment on the blog for your official submission.

11 comments:

Darshan Nellary said...

Hey Josh, figured its around $20.11/

Joshua Wong said...

That's not the answer I have in mind, but I'd like to see how you got to your answer! :)

Darshan Nellary said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Darshan Nellary said...

its dicey man, my bad..

Anonymous said...

-18.45

Joshua Wong said...

OH CHAD!!! You're SO CLOSE! Why does EPS growth have to be lower than discount rate? And what is the implication if it isn't?

Meg said...

it would be negative no? I've never heard of a negative earning per share... (if that really is the EPS you are talking about)

Joshua Wong said...

Awesome! So close Meg! I can tell you applied the dividend growth model formula.

The model usually makes sense right (aka gives us prices greater than zero). So why is it giving us a negative number? Look at what Chad said as a hint.

What assumption has caused our model to break? Think about present value of cash flows.

Anonymous said...

the required return, or discount rate, for an investor comes from dividends plus growth of stock value.... r=Div/Price+g ...since dividends are positive, g must be smaller than r...and it wouldn't make sense for someone to expect to get a return that's lower than the rate of growth

-18.45 was my response too hahahah been a loooong time since I last did this stuff...pulled out my finance books for curiosity...don't even know if the right formulas were applied, which is shocking since I deal with stocks everyday

Joshua Wong said...

Ding ding ding! Chad gets the answer! I'll write a post shortly about the answer!

Ben Dover said...

you are all wrong. the answer is 7