Arbitrage Theory Essay

3775 Words16 Pages
&P500EMPIRICAL TESTING OF ARBITRAGE PRICING THEORY IN INDIA Deepak Gupta Introuction An active body of research in the financial world has been the behaviour of asset returns and the associated forces that determine the prices of risky assets. Numerous competing theories of asset pricing have been developed in the past. These include the original capital asset pricing models (hereafter CAPM) of Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965) and Black (1972), the intertemporal models of Merton (1973), Long (1974), Rubinstein (1976), Breeden (1979), and Cox et al. (1985), and the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) of Ross (1976). Arbitrage Pricing Theory was proposed by S.A. Ross in "'The Arbitrage Theory of Capital Asset Pricing," Journal of Economic Theory . Arbitrage pricing theory, is a general theory of asset pricing, which has become influential in the pricing of shares. APT holds that the expected return of a financial asset can be modelled as a linear function of various macro-economic factors or theoretical market indices, where sensitivity to changes in each factor is represented by a factor-specific beta coefficient. The model-derived rate of return will then be used to price the asset correctly - the asset price should equal the expected end of period price discounted at the rate implied by model. If the price diverges, arbitrage should bring it back into line. At the core of APT is the recognition that only a few systematic factors affect the long-term average returns of financial assets. APT does not deny the myriad factors that influence the daily price variability of individual stocks and bonds, but it focuses on the major forces that move aggregates of assets in large portfolios. By identifying these forces, we can gain an intuitive appreciation of their influence on portfolio returns. The ultimate goal is to acquire a better understanding of portfolio
Open Document