Return smoothing and performance persistence are both sources of autocorrelation in hedge fund returns. The practice of pre-processing the data in order to remove smoothing before conducting performance analysis also affects the predictability of hedge fund returns. This paper develops a...

Hedge funds often hold illiquid assets whose true value is slowly reflected in reported returns. As a result, reported returns of a hedge fund can become a smoothed version of its true realized returns and, thus, can bias the evaluation of hedge fund performance. To address this problem, we...