Housewares & Specialties Companies By Beta

Beta is one of the most important measures of equity market volatility. Beta can be thought of as asset elasticity or sensitivity to market. In other words, it is a number that shows the relationship of an equity instrument to the financial market in which this instrument is traded. For example, if Beta of equity is 2, it is expected to significantly outperform market when the market is going up and significantly underperform when the market is going down. Similarly, Beta of 1 indicates that an asset and market will generate similar returns over time. In a nutshell, Beta is a measure of individual stock risk relative to the overall volatility of the stock market. and is calculated based on very sound finance theory - Capital Assets Pricing Model (CAPM).However, since Beta is calculated based on historical price movements it may not predict how a firm's stock is going to perform in the future.