Modern Portfolio Theory - Comparison With Arbitrage Pricing Theory

Comparison With Arbitrage Pricing Theory

The SML and CAPM are often contrasted with the arbitrage pricing theory (APT), which holds that the expected return of a financial asset can be modeled as a linear function of various macro-economic factors, where sensitivity to changes in each factor is represented by a factor specific beta coefficient.

The APT is less restrictive in its assumptions: it allows for a statistical model of asset returns, and assumes that each investor will hold a unique portfolio with its own particular array of betas, as opposed to the identical "market portfolio". Unlike the CAPM, the APT, however, does not itself reveal the identity of its priced factors - the number and nature of these factors is likely to change over time and between economies.

Read more about this topic:  Modern Portfolio Theory

Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison and/or theory:

    From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
    Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

    The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    ... liberal intellectuals ... tend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the “establishment.”
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)