(1) Should portfolio effects impact the way investors think about the risk of individual stocks? (2) If...

Question:

(1) Should portfolio effects impact the way investors think about the risk of individual stocks?

(2) If you decided to hold a one-stock portfolio and consequently were exposed to more risk than diversified investors, could you expect to be compensated for all of your risk; that is, could you earn a risk premium on that part of your risk that you could have eliminated by diversifying?

Assume that you recently graduated with a major in finance, and you just landed a job as a financial planner with Barney Smith Inc., a large financial services corporation. Your first assignment is to invest $100,000 for a client. Because the funds are to be invested in a business at the end of 1 year, you have been instructed to plan for a 1-year holding period. Further, your boss has restricted you to the investment alternatives shown in the table with their probabilities and associated outcomes. (Disregard for now the items at the bottom of the data; you will fill in the blanks later.) Barney Smith's economic forecasting staff has developed probability estimates for the state of the economy, and its security analysts have developed a sophisticated computer program that was used to estimate the rare of return on each alternative under each state of the economy. Alta Industries is an electronics firm; Repo Men Inc. collects past-due debts; and American Foam manufactures mattresses and various other foam products. Barney Smith also maintains an "index fund" that owns a market-weighted fraction of all publicly traded stocks; you can invest in that fund, and thus obtain average stock market results. Given the situation as described, answer the followingquestions.