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The Global Insight

What does a stock beta of 1 mean?

Author

Christopher Ramos

Updated on February 12, 2026

Analyzing Beta. A beta of 1 indicates that the security’s price tends to move with the market. A beta greater than 1 indicates that the security’s price tends to be more volatile than the market. A beta of less than 1 means it tends to be less volatile than the market.

How do you calculate beta of a stock?

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.

What does the beta of the S & P 500 mean?

A beta of 1 represents the volatility of the given index used to represent the overall market, against which other stocks and their betas are measured. The S&P 500 is such an index. If a stock has a beta of one, it will move the same amount and direction as the index.