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Journal of Finance Vol. 74 No. 4 2019

What Is the Expected Return on a Stock?

Ian Martin1; Christian Wagner2

1 London School of Economics and Political Science · 2 Copenhagen Business School

open access

Abstract

We derive a formula for the expected return on a stock in terms of the risk‐neutral variance of the market and the stock's excess risk‐neutral variance relative to that of the average stock. These quantities can be computed from index and stock option prices; the formula has no free parameters. The theory performs well empirically both in and out of sample. Our results suggest that there is considerably more variation in expected returns, over time and across stocks, than has previously been acknowledged.

DOI
10.1111/jofi.12778
Volume
74
Issue
4
Pages
1887-1929
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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