Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), developed by William Sharpe and John Lintner in the mid-1960s, links the expected return of an asset to its systematic risk, measured by beta. It states that in equilibrium investors are rewarded only for risk that cannot be diversified away: the expected excess return of an asset is proportional to the expected excess return of the market, with beta as the constant of proportionality. CAPM underpins the cost of equity, performance benchmarking, and a vast body of asset-pricing research.