Ameritrade Case Essay

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Dear Andy! Sorry for my second delay with the case – it is all the preparation to university exams. I shall try to finish Friendly Cards in time. So I used to make parallels from cases to our real life and economic situation in Ukraine. At the time we do not have such companies as Ameritrade in Ukraine, because this kind of business does not have it’s customers right now. This is a new thing to our country, and as usual, all the new things are taken distrustfully. I can recall only one example : it is FOREX, but it actually deals with the currency exchange rates, buying and selling currency. The only same thing – all the processes are being held online. 1. What factors should Ameritrade consider when evaluating the proposed advertising program and technology upgrades? Ameritrade needs a cost of capital to evaluate new projects. Firms maximize their value by taking all positive NPV projects. [pic] [pic] [pic] is the expected cash flow in period i [pic] is the discount rate To calculate an NPV, we need a discount rate. In the A-Rod case we used 8%. In the Ocean Carriers case we used 9%. In this case we will learn how to determine an appropriate rate. If Ameritrade analysts use a discount rate that is too high, good projects may be rejected. If they use a discount rate that is too low, bad projects may be accepted. Also the Ameritrade analysts should consider, that their company’s internal discount rate was often used as 15%, but some managers felt appropriate the rate of 8-9%. At this time, the external discount rate, used by Credit Swiss First Boston was 12%. Good observation. So actually computing the NPV earlier, Ameritrade analysts accepted only the best projects which fitted their high requirements. Now at the end of your analysis, we see that Ameritrade has a cost of capital close to

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