BUSF_A01.qxd

Risk and business finance

1.2 Risk and business finance

All decision making involves the future. We can only make decisions about the future;

no matter how much we may regret it, we cannot alter the past. Financial decision

making is no exception to this general rule.

There is only one thing certain about the future, which is that we cannot be sure

what is going to happen. Sometimes we may be able to predict with confidence that

what will occur will be one of a limited range of possibilities. We may even feel able

to ascribe statistical probabilities to the likelihood of occurrence of each possible out-

come; but we can never be completely certain of the future. Riskis therefore an import-

ant factor in all financial decision making, and one that must be considered explicitly

in all cases.

In business finance, as in other aspects of life, risk and return tend to be related.

Intuitively we expect returns to relate to risk in something like the way shown in

Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1
Relationship
between risk
and return

Where there is no risk, the expected return is the risk-free rate. As risk increases, an

increasingly large risk premium, over the risk-free rate, is expected.

‘

In investment, for example, people require a minimum rate to induce them to invest

at all, but they require an increased rate of return – the addition of a risk premium –

to compensate them for taking risks. In Chapter 7 we shall consider the extent to

which, when considering marketable shares and other securities, there does actually

appear to be the linear relationship that Figure 1.1 suggests between levels of risk per-

ceived and the returns that investors expect to receive. Much of business finance is

concerned with striking the appropriate balance between risk and return.