This chapter begins with a brief history of hedge funds from the perspective of hedge fund investors—exploring the attributes that attracted private, wealthy investors to an opaque, nascent hedge fund industry during the decades leading up to new millennium. Following the chronology of several...

In this paper, we are examining hedge funds risk and return profile over the period 1990 to 2003 using Jensen's measure, implied volatility, correlations, covariances, Sharpe and Sortino ratios. The large range in returns and dispersion suggest that the mean variance approach may not indicate a...

We prove that the Omega measure, which considers all moments when assessing portfolio performance, is equivalent to the widely used Sharpe ratio under jointly elliptic distributions of returns. Portfolio optimization of the Sharpe ratio is then explored, with an active-set algorithm presented...