A number of topics relevant to business valuers including CAPM, WACC, betas, ERP, and returns are in the latest paper by Pablo Fernandez (University of Navarra, IESE Business School), "18 Topics Badly Explained by Many Finance Professors." Among his observations:
- Referring to the WACC as the “cost of capital” may be misleading because it is not a cost;
- Volatility is a bad measure of risk;
- Textbooks differ a great deal on their recommendations regarding the equity risk premium;
- There is a mountain of evidence to support the notion that CAPM and its betas do not explain anything about expected or required returns; and
- If someone claims to have a model to calculate expected returns that works reasonably well in the real markets, ask whether that person is a billionaire.
The paper has received a number of comments, one being that students who are badly taught later make wrong decisions in practice, possible destroying shareholder wealth instead of creating it.
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