Cha10 罗斯公司理财第九版原版书课后习题.pdfVIP

Did any types of securities perform well in 2008? The answer is yes because, as stock values declined, bond values increased, particularly U.S. Treasury bonds. In fact, long-term Treasury bonds gained 20 percent, while shorter-term Treasury bonds were up 13 percent. Higher quality long-term corporate bonds did less well, but still managed to achieve a positive return of about 9 percent. These returns were especially impressive considering that the rate of inflation, as measured by the CPI, was very close to zero. What lessons should investors take away from this very recent bit of capital market history? First, and most obviously, stocks have significant risk! But there is a second, equally important lesson. Depending on the mix, a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds probably would have suffered in 2008, but the losses would have been much smaller than those experienced by an all-stock portfolio. Finally, because of increased volatility and heightened risk aversion, many have argued that the equity risk premium going forword is probably (at least temporarily) somewhat higher than has been true historically. Summary and Conclusions 1. This chapter presented returns for a number of different asset classes. The general conclusion is that stocks have outperformed bonds over most of the 20th century, though stocks have also exhibited more risk. 2. The statistical measures in this chapter are necessary building blocks for the material of the next three chapters. In particular, standard deviation and variance measure the variability of the return on an individual security and on portfolios of securities. In the next chapter, we will argue that standard deviation and variance