This paper develops a simple technique that controls for "false discoveries", or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated alphas. We...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

While it is established that idiosyncratic volatility has a negative impact on the cross-section of future stock returns, the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and future hedge fund returns is largely unexplored. We document that hedge funds with high idiosyncratic volatility...

Over the years, a diverse range of drawdown measures has evolved to guide asset management. We show that almost all of these measures fit into a unified framework. This new framework simplifies the implementation of drawdown measures and improves understanding their similarities and differences....

Short sellers are perceived as informed, sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about their actual performance and trading strategies. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of daily position disclosures in Europe, we identify the entry, change, and exit dates of large short-sale positions...

Recently, there has been explosive growth in two products from the hedge fund industry - multi-strategy (MS) funds and funds of hedge funds (FOFs), both of which offer diversification across different hedge fund strategies. In well-functioning markets, both investment vehicles should offer...

This paper develops two measures of performance inconsistency based on information derived from funds' actual performance and their disclosed portfolio holdings. Using these measures, we show that funds with unskilled managers and poor performance are associated with greater inconsistency....

We investigate hedge fund firms' unobserved performance (UP), measured as the riskadjusted return difference between a fund firm’s reported return and hypothetical portfolio return derived from its disclosed long equity holdings. Fund firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 7.2%...