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The Global Insight

How do you calculate the expected return on a stock?

Author

Christopher Ramos

Updated on February 19, 2026

The expected return is the amount of profit or loss an investor can anticipate receiving on an investment. An expected return is calculated by multiplying potential outcomes by the odds of them occurring and then totaling these results.

Is negative beta good?

Negative beta: A beta less than 0, which would indicate an inverse relation to the market, is possible but highly unlikely. Some investors argue that gold and gold stocks should have negative betas because they tend to do better when the stock market declines. Many new technology companies have a beta higher than 1.

How do you calculate beta with expected return and total risk?

Beta could be calculated by first dividing the security’s standard deviation of returns by the benchmark’s standard deviation of returns. The resulting value is multiplied by the correlation of the security’s returns and the benchmark’s returns.

How to calculate expected return with beta and risk premiums?

You can use the capital asset pricing model, or CAPM, to estimate the return on an asset — such as a stock, bond, mutual fund or portfolio of investments — by examining the asset’s relationship to price movements in the market. How to Calculate Expected Return With Beta & Market Risk Premiums.

What happens if a stock has beta of 0.5?

That means this stock could rise by 20%. On the other hand, if the market declines 6%, investors in that company can expect a loss of 12%. If a stock had a beta of 0.5, we would expect it to be half as volatile as the market: A market return of 10% would mean a 5% gain for the company.

Where can I find the beta of a T-Bill?

Current T-bill rates are available at the Treasury Direct website. Beta of the asset (β a), a measure of the asset’s price volatility relative to that of the whole market Expected market return (r m), a forecast of the market’s return over a specified time.

Is the past beta a good predictor of the future?

One study by Gene Fama and Ken French, “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns,” published in 1992 in the Journal of Finance, concluded that past beta is not a good predictor of future beta for stocks. In fact, they concluded, betas seem to revert back to the mean over time.