BETA

The measure of a fund's or stocks risk in relation to the market , or an alternative benchmark . A beta of 1.5 means that a stock's excess return is expected to move 1.5 times the market excess returns. E.g. if market excess return is 10% then we expect, on average, the stock return to be 15%. Beta is referred to as an index of the systematic risk due to general market conditions that cannot be diversified away.