This paper illustrates how qualitative analysis can be incorporated into quantitative risk measurement in order to construct an expected distribution of hedge fund returns that explicitly allows for market, residual and tail risk. We show how the combination of statistical criteria with...

Performance measurement is an area of crucial interest in asset valuation and investment management. High volatility as well as time aggregation of returns, amongst other characteristics, may distort the results of conventional measures of performance. In this work, we study the performance of...

We propose a novel methodology that jointly estimates the proportions of skilled/unskilled funds and the cross-sectional distribution of skill in the mutual fund industry. We model this distribution as a three-component mixture of a point mass at zero and two components — one negative, one...

We investigate behavior of optimal hedge fund leverage in a fund that has a compensation contract with high-water mark and hurdle rate provisions. A risk neutral fund manager can continuously reallocate assets while she obtains management and performance fees in discrete time moments. We find...

Hedge fund managers are subject to several non-linear incentives: (a) performance fee options (call); (b) equity investor's redemption options (put); (c) prime broker contracts allowing for forced deleverage (put). The interaction of these option-like incentives affects optimal leverage ex-ante,...

One can consider the concept of market neutrality as having quot;breadthquot; and quot;depthquot;: quot;Breadthquot; reflects the number of market risks to which the hedge fund is neutral, while quot;depthquot; reflects the quot;completenessquot; of the neutrality of the fund to market risks. We...

We explore a new dimension of the dependence of hedge fund returns with the market portfolio by examining linear correlation and tail dependence conditional on the financial cycle. Using a large sample of hedge funds that are considered "market neutral", we document that the low correlation of...

Hedge fund managers are subject to several non-linear incentives: (a) performance fee options (call); (b) equity investor's redemption options (put); (c) prime broker contracts allowing for forced deleverage (put). The interaction of these option-like incentives affects optimal leverage ex-ante,...

Using the setting of funds of hedge funds (FoFs), we show that prime brokers (PBs) facilitate investors' search for informed hedge fund managers. We find that FoFs exhibit PB bias, a disproportionate preference for hedge funds serviced by their connected PBs. This PB bias is stronger when the...

This paper provides a new method to construct a dynamic optimal portfolio for asset management. This method generates a target payoff distribution using the cheapest dynamic trading strategy. As a practical example, the method is applied to hedge fund replication. This dynamic portfolio strategy...