When the market price of equity is observable, several accepted approaches exist to estimate cost of equity capital; however, the CAPM is the most widely used. In the CAPM, firm betas are estimated from market returns, and the expected return for each firm is computed from the firm beta using the security market line. Fama and French (2003) state that the two most widely used practical applications of the CAPM are the estimation of cost of equity capital and portfolio performance evaluation. Because of its widespread acceptance and ease of implementation, the CAPM is selected as the risk-return benchmark model for these tests. One drawback is that all of our tests become essentially joint tests of the cluster method and the CAPM, and if the method is rejected, we cannot be certain if it is because the cluster methodology is not useful or because the CAPM is not a sufficiently accurate description of the risk-return relationship.