Market Risk Premium

I am trying to figure out WACC.
In practice, what risk-rate do you use?
What market risk premium do you choose? something like 5%?
In addition, for a company with a market cap of 1billion USD. What size premium do you apply?

Would appreciate your insights.

 

In LatAm: I've seen ppl use the current or some kind of average when it comes to 10Y T-Notes on the RF rate.

When it comes to market premium, the usual is to use a value between 4% and 7%. I'm not sure if using the "Historical excess returns of a value-weighted index like S&P 500 minus historical performance of 10-yr treasuries." is such a good idea in bear markets like this one.(Because it's like -20%)

Same thing goes for the Betas(WAY too much volatility).

I'm not sure how it's done in the US.

Valuation is not a trade, it's an art: You need to find the right value. Otherwise there would be computers filling premade DCFs with market statistics.

 

You should never use the historical yield on a 10 year treasury. That's just ridiculous. The current market conditions aren't reflective of the "historical average."

The risk free rate you use should have the same time to maturity as the investment. If you're looking at a 10 year time frame for the investment then use the 10 year rate. If you looking at a one or five year project use a one or five year rate...

 
Best Response

I would argue that for the MRP you would certainly want to use historical returns for 10-year note, otherwise you are measuring completely the wrong thing. It doesn't make any more sense to use the current RFR in MRP than it does to use yesterday's change in S&P 500 as the historical return.

In my opinion, its all relative to the time period.

Also, to the point about whether to use the current rate or what... I do not entirely agree with the whole "Market Efficiently prices in [fill in blank]" but thats a whole other debate that is very well publicized. With the volatility in this market, I don't know if you could say that's completely true. Anyway... I would use LIBOR as the basis anyway, its closer to the practical risk-free in many ways.

BTW, pretty sure he didn't mean like average historical as like 10 years but maybe the past year or month or less. I mean if you were to use the rates for the day the Fed released its long-term treasury buy back program, the week before and the week after you'd have quite different results. It's an interesting point worth considering at least, I wouldn't say that considering some sort of average is completely nonsense, even though I understand your point about expected value well. It's not black and white, as someone mentioned before, its more art than science.

Jack: They’re all former investment bankers who were laid off from that economic crisis that Nancy Pelosi caused. They have zero real world skills, but God they work hard. -30 Rock
 

No Leverage, before you call me an idiot, the issue certainly isn't as black and white as you suggest.

What you are proposing is to use the implied ERP, which essentially compares historical stock market performance to the current treasury yield. In that case, yes, it would also make sense to use the current treasury yield for the risk-free rate.

But in reality, many people - including many of my professors - are still using the historical ERP, which compares historical stock market performance to the historical average treasury yield. In this case then, it would also make sense to use the historical treasury yield for the risk-free rate.

I don't know why both methods are still in use, but the fact is they are. The important thing, as MonkeyKingdom mentioned, is to stay consistent between the risk-free rate and the risk premium (ie. use current t-bond yield for both or historical t-bond yield for both). Otherwise, you run into trouble in markets like today: if you use a historical ERP and a current risk-free rate, you will arrive at a much lower cost of capital - one that is probably unrealistic if you're trying to value a company 10, 15, 20 years into the future.

As previously mentioned, this stuff is more of an art than a science.

 

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