Harold and Kumar are employees with White Castle Advisors. W…

Harold and Kumar are employees with White Castle Advisors. White Castle offers independent investment advice to institutional clients throughout the U.S and Canada. Harold’s and Kumar’s primary responsibility is evaluating the performance of portfolio managers that White Castle’s clients are considering. When necessary, they create customized benchmarks and use the Sharpe, Treynor, ex-post alpha, and M2 measures. These measures adjust a manager’s return for the risk undertaken, where risk is defined as total using the standard deviation or as systematic using beta. Harold and Kumar are preparing an analysis of the performance of the Alpha and Omega Mutual funds. Alpha and Omega are being considered by the endowment of Citi University as an addition to its portfolio. Chuck Prince is the portfolio manager for the Citi endowment. Citi’s current endowment is well diversified, consisting of U.S. and international stocks and bonds, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts, and a small cash position necessary to meet next Quarter’s expenses. In  addition  to  the  Alpha  and  Omega Mutual funds under consideration, Prince is also considering adding  individual  bonds  to  Citi’s  portfolio because individual bonds have become  increasingly  more  liquid.  Harold  believes  that  municipal  bonds would be a good consideration because their  after-tax  return  is  often  higher  than  that  available  from corporate bonds. Prince informs them that Citi  is  also  considering  adding  BBB  rated  bonds  as  a  small portion of their portfolio, but Kumar  believes  that  this  is  probably  not  a  good  idea  because,  although  he has not reviewed Citi’s  investment  policy  statement,  endowments  typically  have  a  low  ability  and willingness to take risk because the endowment must meet the  spending  needs  created  by  university operating budgets, student scholarships, and faculty salaries. The most recent risk and return measures for both Alpha and Omega are shown below. The minimum acceptable return (MAR) for Citi is the 5.0% spending rate on the endowment, which the endowment has determined using a geometric spending rule. The T-bill return over the same fiscal year was 4.5%. The return on the Wilshire-5000 was used as the market index. The Wilshire 5000 index had a return of 10% with a standard deviation of 21% and a beta of 1.0. Analyzing the results of their performance evaluation, Harold notices that the results demonstrate that the Alpha portfolio is less diversified than the Omega portfolio. Kumar adds that the Omega portfolio would be a better addition to the Citi portfolio than the Alpha fund.                                                                                                  Alpha                Omega                                                   Return                                     16.5%                15.9%                                                   Std. Deviation                         38.1%                35.6%                                                   Beta                                          0.8                    1.25                                                   Downside Deviation               14.9%                14.0%Which of the two funds is showing a better performance using M-squared measure?
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Emily is trying to decide between investing $1,000 or $1,500…

Emily is trying to decide between investing $1,000 or $1,500 at the beginning of each year for the next 40 years into a retirement account yielding 10.78%. After 40 years, how much extra money will Emily have in her IRA if she invests $1,500 annually instead of $1,000 annually?
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