The Impact of Illiquidity and Higher Moments of Hedge Fund Returns on Their Risk-Adjusted Performance and Diversification Potential

This paper studies the joint impact of smoothing and fat tails on the risk-return properties of hedge fund strategies. First, we adjust risk and performance measures for illiquidity and the non-Gaussian distribution of hedge funds returns. We use two risk metrics: the Modified Value-at-Risk and a preference-based measure retrieved from the linear-exponential utility function. Second, we revisit the hedge fund diversification effect with these adjustments for illiquidity. Our results report similar fund performance rankings and optimal hedge fund strategy allocations for both adjusted metrics. We also show that the benefits of hedge funds in portfolio diversification are still persistent but tend to weaken after the adjustment for illiquidity