What is a bottom up beta?

Levered bottom-up beta = Unlevered beta (1+ (1-t) (Debt/Equity)) If you expect the business mix of your firm to change over time, you can change the weights on a year-to-year basis. If you expect your debt to equity ratio to change over time, the levered beta will change over time.

Levered beta measures the risk of a firm with debt and equity in its capital structure to the volatility of the market. … Consequently, the company’s stock is deemed to be getting riskier but that risk is not due to market risk. Isolating and removing the debt component of overall risk results in unlevered beta.

Regression betas are levered betas but they reflect the financial leverage of the companies in the sample (and not your company). You have to take out the financial leverage effect (unlever the beta) to come up with a pure play or business beta.

Since the reported beta for the firm reflects the cash holdings that the firm had during the regression period, the beta has to be adjusted by doing the following: Step 2a: Estimate the cash balance as a percentage of firm value during the period of the regression.

Stock 3 has a net cash position (negative net debt), so when it is converted, the asset beta is actually higher than the equity beta. This also makes sense because the value of cash never changes, so the volatility in the stock (equity beta) is actually lowered by the effect of the net cash position.

Total beta is a risk measure equal to the standard deviation of total returns expected for a stock (using returns for proxy publicly-traded companies) divided by the standard deviation of total returns expected for the market portfolio.

A beta that is greater than 1.0 indicates that the security’s price is theoretically more volatile than the market. For example, if a stock’s beta is 1.2, it is assumed to be 20% more volatile than the market. Technology stocks and small cap stocks tend to have higher betas than the market benchmark.

Debt affects a company’s levered beta in that increasing the total amount of a company’s debt will increase the value of its levered beta. Debt does not affect a company’s unlevered beta, which by its nature does not take debt or its effects into account.

Negative beta: A beta less than 0, which would indicate an inverse relation to the market, is possible but highly unlikely. Some investors argue that gold and gold stocks should have negative betas because they tend to do better when the stock market declines. … Many new technology companies have a beta higher than 1.

Generally, Unlevered beta is lower than the levered beta however, it could be higher in some cases especially when the net debt is negative (meaning that the company has more cash than debt).

The beta coefficient is the degree of change in the outcome variable for every 1-unit of change in the predictor variable. … If the beta coefficient is negative, the interpretation is that for every 1-unit increase in the predictor variable, the outcome variable will decrease by the beta coefficient value.

The formula for calculating beta is the covariance of the return of an asset with the return of the benchmark, divided by the variance of the return of the benchmark over a certain period.

The asset beta (unlevered beta) is the beta of a company on the assumption that the company uses only equity financing. In contrast, the equity beta (levered beta, project beta) takes into account different levels of the company’s debt.

The top-down approach is easier for investors who are less experienced and for those who don’t have the time to analyze a company’s financials. Bottom-up investing can help investors pick quality stocks that outperform the market even during periods of decline.

After unlevering the Betas, we can now use the appropriate “industry” Beta (e.g. the mean of the comps’ unlevered Betas) and relever it for the appropriate capital structure of the company being valued. After relevering, we can use the levered Beta in the CAPM formula to calculate cost of equity.