Remove CAPM Remove Development Remove Market Risk Remove Marketing
article thumbnail

Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

When executives evaluate a potential investment, whether it's to build a new plant, enter a new market, or acquire a company, they weigh its cost against the future cash flows they expect will spring from it. Not at all, he said, because it's "no secret that applying the CAPM is as much an art as financial science." McNulty et al.

CAPM 14
article thumbnail

Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? Look at the variance of your new-market products. Product development'

article thumbnail

Why Sit on All that Cash? Firms Uncertain on Cost of Capital

Harvard Business Review

Only 46 percent use the perpetuity growth model, while 27 percent develop an explicit cash flow forecast for the entire life of a project. Fully 72 percent develop multiple cash flow scenarios representing the expected outcome as well as best- and worst-case outcomes, which are then discounted. Current market debt/equity ratio.