The authors decomposed their estimated pre-fee 1995–2009 hedge fund return of 11.13 percent into fees (3.43 percent), an alpha (3.00 percent), and a beta (4.70 percent). The year-by-year results show that alphas were positive during every year of the past decade, even during the recent...

Despite the retrenchment of the hedge fund industry in 2008, hedge fund assets under management are currently over one and a half trillion dollars. We analyze the potential biases in reported hedge fund returns, in particular survivor-ship bias and back fill bias. We then decompose the returns...