In the attached article, Epic S&P 500 Rally Is Powered by Assets You Can’t See or Touch – Bloomberg.pdf the author discusses the rising importance of intangible capital to firms stocks’ valuations. This trend, present with us over the last few decades and accelerating, presents multiple challenges to analysts of the stock markets. Several questions can and should be raised in terms of how the intangible capital is being valued by the firms.
In relation to lectures 5 and 6 materials, how vulnerable do you think is intangible capital valuation to business cycles risk? Which companies, in your view, present greater cyclicality risk and why: those in Group A (top 20% of the firms based on their intangible share of total assets) or Group B (bottom 20% of the firms based on their intangible share of total assets)? If there are such differences in companies’ cyclicality risks by quantiles, can efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) still hold?
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