Master funds in portfolio analysis with general deviation measures

Generalized measures of deviation are considered as substitutes for standard deviation in a framework like that of classical portfolio theory for coping with the uncertainty inherent in achieving rates of return beyond the risk-free rate. Such measures, derived for example from conditional value-at-risk and its variants, can reflect the different attitudes of different classes of investors. They lead nonetheless to generalized one-fund theorems in which a more customized version of portfolio optimization is the aim, rather than the idea that a single “master fund” might arise from market equilibrium and serve the interests of all investors.The results that are obtained cover discrete distributions along with continuous distributions. They are applicable therefore to portfolios involving derivatives, which create jumps in distribution functions at specific gain or loss values, well as to financial models involving finitely many scenarios. Furthermore, they deal rigorously with issues that come up at that level of generality, but have not received adequate attention, including possible lack of differentiability of the deviation expression with respect to the portfolio weights, and the potential nonuniqueness of optimal weights.The results also address in detail the phenomenon that if the risk-free rate lies above a certain threshold, the usually envisioned master fund must be replaced by one of alternative type, representing a “net short position” instead of a “net long position” in the risky instruments. For nonsymmetric deviation measures, the second type need not just be the reverse of the first type, and there can sometimes even be an interval for the risk-free rate in which no master fund of either type exists. A notion of basic fund, in place of master fund, is brought in to get around this difficulty and serve as a single guide to optimality regardless of such circumstances.     

Polynomial goal programming and the implicit higher moment preferences of US institutional investors in hedge funds

Polynomial goal programming (PGP) is a flexible method that allows investor preferences for different moments of the return distribution of financial assets to be included in the portfolio optimization. The method is intuitive and particularly suitable for incorporating investor preferences in higher moments of the return distribution. However, until now, PGP has not been able to meet its full potential because it requires quantification of “real” preference parameters towards those moments. To date, the chosen preference parameters have been selected somewhat “arbitrarily”. Our goal is to calculate implied sets of preference parameters using investors’ choices of and the importance they attribute to risk and performance measures. We use three groups of institutional investors—pension funds, insurance companies, and endowments—and derive implied sets of preference parameters in the context of a hedge fund portfolio optimization. To determine “real” preferences for the higher moments of the portfolio return distribution, we first fit implied preference parameters so that the PGP optimal portfolio is identical to the desired hedge fund portfolio. With the obtained economically justified sets of preference parameters, the well-established PGP framework can be employed more efficiently to derive allocations that satisfy institutional investor expectations for hedge fund investments. Furthermore, the implied preference parameters enable fund of hedge fund managers and other investment managers to derive optimal portfolio allocations based on specific investor expectations. Moreover, the importance of individual moments, as well as their marginal rates of substitution, can be assessed.     

Portfolio choice and equilibrium in capital markets with safety-first investors

This paper develops optimal portfolio choice and market equilibrium when investors behave according to a generalized lexicographic safety-first rule. We show that the mutual fund separation property holds for the optimal portfolio choice of a risk-averse safety-first investor. We also derive an explicit valuation formula for the equilibrium value of assets. The valuation formula reduces to the well-known two-parameter capital asset pricing model (CAPM) when investors approximate the tail of the portfolio distribution using Tchebychev's inequality or when the assets have normal or stable Paretian distributions. This shows the robustness of the CAPM to safety-first investors under traditional distributional assumptions. In addition, we indicate how additional information about the portfolio distribution can be incorporated to the safety-first valuation formula to obtain alternative empirically testable models.     

Hedge funds and optimal asset allocation: Bayesian expectations and spanning tests

This paper analyzes the contribution of hedge funds to optimal asset allocations between 1993 and 2010. The preferences of specific institutional investors are captured by implementing a Bayesian asset allocation framework that incorporates heterogeneous expectations regarding hedge fund alpha. Mean-variance spanning tests are used to infer the ability of hedge funds to significantly enhance the mean-variance efficient frontier. Further, a novel democratic variance decomposition procedure sheds light on the dynamics in the co-movement of hedge fund returns with a set of common benchmark assets. The empirical findings indicate that portfolio benefits of hedge funds are time-varying and strongly depend on investor optimism regarding hedge funds’ ability to generate alpha. In general, allocations to hedge funds improve the global minimum variance portfolio even after controlling for short-selling restrictions and minimum diversification constraints. However, due to dynamics underlying the composition of the aggregate hedge fund universe, the factor structure of hedge fund returns has become more similar to the benchmark assets over time.     

Framing and the disposition effect: evidence from mutual fund investor redemption behaviour

Research on decision-making under uncertainty has highlighted that individuals often use simple heuristics and/or exhibit behavioural biases. Specifically, with respect to portfolio decisions, research has indicated that investors are subject to the disposition effect, i.e. they are reluctant to sell assets that have performed poorly (losers) and prone to sell assets that have performed well (winners). We find that the mutual fund investors in our sample are subject to the disposition effect when they withdraw the redemption proceeds from their account, but not when they reallocate the proceeds within the account. The evidence is consistent with Shefrin and Statman’s hypothesis that framing a transaction as a transfer as opposed to a sale mitigates the disposition effect.     

MUTUAL FUND BROKERAGE COMMISSIONS

The brokerage commissions paid for portfolio transactions by a large sample of equity mutual funds are investigated. Median brokerage commissions measured as a percentage of net assets are 21 basis points per year with a standard deviation of 27 basis points. The commission levels are negatively correlated with fund size and positively correlated with fund turnover and expense ratio. The average brokerage commission measured as a percentage of assets traded exceeds the typical execution-only commissions for large institutional traders. This finding is consistent with many mutual fund brokerage commissions including payments for research, so-called soft dollar payments. Funds' expense ratios are positively correlated with commissions per trade, inconsistent with the idea that mutual fund managers who pay soft dollars for research have a corresponding reduction in management fees.     

Offsetting the implicit incentives: Benefits of benchmarking in money management

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management. This gives a manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. The misaligned incentives create potentially significant deviations of the manager’s policy from that desired by fund investors. In the context of a familiar continuous-time portfolio choice model, we demonstrate how a simple risk management practice that accounts for benchmarking can ameliorate the adverse effects of managerial incentives. Our results contrast with the conventional view that benchmarking a fund manager is not in the best interest of investors.     

Share restrictions and asset pricing: Evidence from the hedge fund industry

This paper presents evidence on the relation between hedge fund returns and restrictions imposed by funds that limit the liquidity of fund investors. The excess returns of funds with lockup restrictions are approximately 4–7% per year higher than those of nonlockup funds. The average alpha of all funds is negative or insignificant after controlling for lockups and other share restrictions. Also, a negative relation is found between share restrictions and the liquidity of the fund's portfolio. This suggests that share restrictions allow funds to efficiently manage illiquid assets, and these benefits are captured by investors as a share illiquidity premium.     

The tactical and strategic value of hedge fund strategies: a cointegration approach

This paper analyzes long-term comovements between hedge fund strategies and traditional asset classes using multivariate cointegration methodology. Since cointegrated assets are tied together over the long run, a portfolio consisting of these assets will have lower long-term volatility. Thus, if the presence of cointegration lowers uncertainty, risk-averse investors should prefer assets that are cointegrated. Long-term (passive) investors can benefit from the knowledge of cointegrating relationships, while the built-in error correction mechanism allows active asset managers to anticipate short-run price movements. The empirical results indicate there is a long-run relationship between specific hedge fund strategies and traditional financial assets. Thus, the benefits of different hedge fund strategies are much less than suggested by correlation analysis and portfolio optimization. However, certain strategies combined with specific stock market segments offer portfolio managers adequate diversification potential, especially in the framework of tactical asset allocation.

The diversification effects of volatility-related assets

We examine whether investors can improve their investment opportunity sets through the addition of volatility-related assets into various groupings of benchmark portfolios. By first analyzing the weekly returns of three VIX-related assets over the period 1996-2008 and then applying mean-variance spanning tests, we find that adding VIX-related assets does lead to a statistically significant enlargement of the investment opportunity set for investors. Our empirical findings are robust and have two implications. First, there is scope for the further development of financial products relating to volatility indexes. Second, hedge fund managers can utilize VIX futures contracts or VIX-squared portfolios to enhance their equity portfolio performance, as measured by the Sharpe ratio.     

Portfolio selection based on the mean–VaR efficient frontier

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has become one of the standard measures for assessing risk not only in the financial industry but also for asset allocations of individual investors. The traditional mean–variance framework for portfolio selection should, however, be revised when the investor's concern is the VaR instead of the standard deviation. This is especially true when asset returns are not normal. In this paper, we incorporate VaR in portfolio selection, and we propose a mean–VaR efficient frontier. Due to the two-objective optimization problem that is associated with the mean–VaR framework, an evolutionary multi-objective approach is required to construct the mean–VaR efficient frontier. Specifically, we consider the elitist non-dominated sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). From our empirical analysis, we conclude that the risk-averse investor might inefficiently allocate his/her wealth if his/her decision is based on the mean–variance framework.     

Portfolio selection with a drawdown constraint

When identifying optimal portfolios, practitioners often impose a drawdown constraint. This constraint is even explicit in some money management contracts such as the one recently involving Merrill Lynch’ management of Unilever’s pension fund. In this setting, we provide a characterization of optimal portfolios using mean–variance analysis. In the absence of a benchmark, we find that while the constraint typically decreases the optimal portfolio’s standard deviation, the constrained optimal portfolio can be notably mean–variance inefficient. In the presence of a benchmark such as in the Merrill Lynch–Unilever contract, we find that the constraint increases the optimal portfolio’s standard deviation and tracking error volatility. Thus, the constraint negatively affects a portfolio manager’s ability to track a benchmark.     

美国银行“被瘦身”

随着新的关于另类资产监管条款的出台,面对严苛的政策法规,美国各个银行不得不开始新一轮的"瘦身"潮。     

基金网络能够提高投资绩效吗？

基金网络在金融市场的信息流动中发挥着重要作用。本文利用基金共同持股关系构建了一个有效的基金网络数据集,以中国资本市场股票型基金2005-2018年季度数据为研究样本,考察基金网络是否以及如何影响投资绩效。结果表明,基金在基金网络中越处于网络中心地位,基金的投资绩效越高。使用基金家族网络作为工具变量缓解内生性偏误后,基金网络仍然对投资绩效具有显著的正向影响。进一步地,本文考察了基金网络影响投资绩效的渠道,结果表明,基金网络主要通过提高基金的选股技能、资产配置技能和管理技能影响投资绩效。最后,本文考察了基金网络对基金市场份额的影响,研究发现基金网络会显著提高基金的市场份额,对基金在市场上的占有率有积极的正向影响。     

Equilibrium relations in a capital asset market: A mean absolute deviation approach

We consider the equilibrium in a capital asset market where the risk is measured by the absolute deviation, instead of the standard deviation of the rate of return of the portfolio. It is shown that the equilibrium relations proved by Mossin for the mean variance (MV) model can also be proved for the mean absolute deviation (MAD) model under similar assumptions on the capital market. In particular, a sufficient condition is derived for the existence of a unique nonnegative equilibrium price vector and derive its explicit formula in terms of exogeneously determined variables. Also, we prove relations between the expected rate of return of individual assets and the market portfolio.     

Should smart investors buy funds with high past returns?

We fully characterize the equilibria in a gme between a fundmanager of unknown ability who control the riskiness of hisportfolio and investors who only observe realized returns. Wederive two types of equilibria. The first one is such that (i)investors invest in the fund if the realized return falls withinsome interval, i.e., is neither too low nor too high, (ii) agood manager picks a portfolio of minimal riskiness and (iii)a bad manager picks a portfolio with higher risk, "gambling"on a lucky outcome. The second type of equilibrium is more traditional:(i) investors invest in the fund if the observed return is largerthan some threshold, and (ii) good and bad managers choose thesame risk level.     

International Portfolio Investment Flows

This article develops a model of international equity portfolio investment flows based on differences in informational endowments between foreign and domestic investors. It is shown that when domestic investors possess a cumulative information advantage over foreign investors about their domestic market, investors tend to purchase foreign assets in periods when the return on foreign assets is high and to sell when the return is low. The implications of the model are tested using data on United States (U.S.) equity portfolio flows.     

High‐Water Marks: High Risk Appetites? Convex Compensation,Long Horizons,and Portfolio Choice

We study the portfolio choice of hedge fund managers who are compensated by high-water mark contracts. We find that even risk-neutral managers do not place unbounded weights on risky assets, despite option-like contracts. Instead, they place a constant fraction of funds in a mean-variance efficient portfolio and the rest in the riskless asset, acting as would constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) investors. This result is a direct consequence of the in(de)finite horizon of the contract. We show that the risk-seeking incentives of option-like contracts rely on combining finite horizons and convex compensation schemes rather than on convexity alone.     

Global equity fund performance, portfolio concentration, and the fundamental law of active management

This paper investigates the relation between portfolio concentration and the performance of global equity funds. Concentrated funds with higher levels of tracking error display better performance than their more broadly diversified counterparts. We show that the observed relation between portfolio concentration and performance is mostly driven by the breadth of the underlying fund strategies; not just by fund managers’ willingness to take big bets. Our results indicate that when investors strive to select the best-performing funds, they should not only consider fund managers’ tracking-error levels. More important is that they take into account the extent to which fund managers carefully allocate their risk budget across multiple investment strategies and have concentrated holdings in multiple market segments simultaneously.     

Performance Attribution of US Institutional Investors

Institutional investors play a prominent role in today's markets. Quarterly reported portfolio holdings make it possible to evaluate the risk-adjusted equity investment performance of all institutional investors in the United States during 1981–2002. The results indicate that institutional investors have been successful in managing client assets; they have added significant value by generating excess returns after controlling for underlying portfolio risk factors. Style choice is the main factor in determining overall portfolio performance, but institutional investors also displayed significant stock selection skills during the period. The stocks they choose for their portfolios have outperformed the stocks they exclude.