The theory of option pricing has undergone rapid advances in recent years. Simultaneously, organized option markets have developed in the United States and Europe. The closed form solution for pricing options has only recently been developed, but its potential for application to problems in finance is tremendous. Almost all financial assets are really contingent claims. Especially, Black and Scholes (1973) suggest that the equity in a levered firm can be thought of as a call option. When shareholders issue bonds, it is equivalent to selling the assets of the firm to the bond holders in return for cash (the proceeds of the bond issues) and a call option.  This paper takes the insight provided by Black and Scholes and shows how it may be applied to many of the traditional issues in corporate finance such as dividend policy, acquisitions and divestitures and capital structure.  In this paper a combined capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and option pricing model (OPM) is considered and then applied to the derivation of equity value and its systematic risk. Essentially, this paper is an attempt to gain a clearer focus theoretically on the question of corporate stock risk and how the OPM adds to its understanding.