leading financial

You are part of the analysis team of a leading financial arm – ’REP Associates’ –
working for a big private equity client – EDGE solutions ltd – who is looking to open
an investment fund, with up to 2 billion invested in different asset classes in the UK
market. They have two speci?c questions for REP Associates: (i) the optimal alloca-
tion to be invested in real estate and (ii) the optimal capital structure that should be
behind real estate investment.
Your division director Dr. Tommaso Gabrieli has required you to produce a tech-
nical report. Word limit: 4,000.1 Dr. Gabrieli is giving you a detailed instructions on
the content and form of the report.
CONT E NT
Optimal allocation to be invested in real estate. You should consider the follow-
ing asset classes: equities, bonds, direct real estate, indirect real estate. You should
download historical total returns for each asset class. Monthly returns are preferred
but you should also test the implications of different time-periods. For equities, you
should download UK FTSE All Share total returns, for bonds you should download
UK 10 years GILT total returns, for direct real estate you should download UK IPD
index total returns, for indirect real estate you should download the UK EPRA total
returns. On this, you will meet an external consultant from Data-stream who will
offer help and advice on October 17th.

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Excluding appendixes, tables and ?gures. The report has to be concise and effective rather than
wordy, 3,000 words is probably the optimal length.
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Based on the data, your report should have a descriptive statistics section, where
you will present descriptive statics about the returns of the various asset classes (e.g.
graphs, mean, standard deviations), discuss the risk/return properties (e.g. by pre-
senting the Sharpe Ratios) and discuss the auto-correlation and the correlation be-
tween asset classes.
Then, your report should suggest an optimal portfolio allocation based on the
concept of ef?cient frontier. Dr. Stanimira Milcheva, head of the Financial Strategy and
Management division, will run a number of lectures and workshops helping you to
obtain the necessary technical skills.
You should discuss how the issue of smoothing may affect your optimal allocation
and compute the optimal allocation with de-smoothed IPD returns.
Optimal capital structure. You should use the REIT company Land Securities as a
benchmark. You should compute Land Securities shares historical total returns and
compute the company’s beta (CAPM model). You should use both a balanced allo-
cation (equal weights in equities, real estate and bonds) as well as an equity index
(FTSE All Share) as the market portfolio and explore the different implications.
Based on the beta of Land Securities, and possibly other companies, you should dis-
cuss the return expected by investors in REITS. Exploring the last annual report of
Land Securities, you should compute the typical debt to equity ratio of a REIT. Based
on the con

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