We develop a new tail risk measure for hedge funds to examine the impact of tail risk on fund performance and to identify the sources of tail risk. We find that tail risk affects the cross-sectional variation in fund returns, and investments in both, tailsensitive stocks as well as options,...

We develop a new systematic tail risk measure for equity-oriented hedge funds to examine the impact of tail risk on fund performance and to identify the sources of tail risk. We find that tail risk affects the cross-sectional variation in fund returns, and investments in both, tail-sensitive...

We examine the relative weights hedge fund investors attach to past information in the fund selection process. The weighting scheme appears inconsistent with econometric forecasting models that predict fund returns, alphas or Sharpe ratios. In particular, investor flows are highly sensitive to...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

20 years ago, Sharpe (1992) developed the Style Analysis for mutual funds; in this analysis, the weights mutual funds allocate to major asset classes are constrained to sum up to 1. In this paper we develop a Time-Varying Style Analysis (TVSA) in which the weights must sum up to 1 but are...

In the recent years the alternative asset class of hedge funds is widely discussed in financial literature. On the one hand this is caused by an increasing demand on these unregulated investments and on the other hand it is caused by a lack of transparency concerning their investment strategies...

We study the out-of-sample predictability of the returns of pan-European harmonized mutual funds that apply hedge fund-like investment strategies (“Alternative UCITS”). Given these funds' higher liquidity, investors could exploit relevant information much easier than for hedge funds, and use...

This paper examines the effect of investor-level real-world investment constraints, including several which had not been studied before, on hedge fund performance and its persistence. Using a large consolidated database, we demonstrate that hedge fund performance persistence is significantly...

We reconsider the question of whether beta-centric hedge fund activity is predictive of superior performance. We construct a measure of overall beta activity of fund managers, Beta Activity, and find evidence that top beta active managers deliver superior long term out-of-sample performance...

This paper examines the value of hedge fund activism from the perspective of activist hedge funds' investors. On average, an activist hedge fund's equity holdings of intervention targets do not perform differently from its own non-target holdings. However, its target holdings outperform its...