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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
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Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? If so, we should use a set of processes when designing and launching businesses that are geared for prediction — ask the right questions, perform the right analyses, plan production and supply chain for predictable variations on projected sales.

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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

He got his PhD at Yale under Shiller’s supervision in 1984, but since then he has also done a lot of work expanding on Fama’s ideas about risk and return, some of it co-authored with Fama’s son-in-law and University of Chicago finance colleague, John Cochrane. And the theory that was available then was CAPM. It goes back to the 1970s.

CAPM 8
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Why Sit on All that Cash? Firms Uncertain on Cost of Capital

Harvard Business Review

Many are deeply uncertain about which initiatives they should fund — and one root of this indecision is a general lack of confidence in the cost of capital projections they are using to make the call. More than one-third of organizations forecast explicit cash flows for the first 10 years of a project.