L-performance with an application to hedge funds

This paper introduces a new parametric fund performance measure, called the L-performance. The L-performance is an alternative to the Sharpe performance, which is commonly used in practice despite its inability to account for skewness and heavy tails of unconditional return distributions. The L-performance improves upon the Sharpe measure in this respect. Technically, it resembles the Sharpe measure in that it is defined as a ratio of the first- and second-order moments, which are the trimmed L-moments instead of the conventional (power) moments. The trimming parameters allow for focusing the L-performance on specific risk levels of interest, according to financial risk criteria. For illustration, a set of L-performances is computed for a variety of hedge funds. The empirical study shows the use of L-performance for fund ranking and return smoothing (manipulation) control.     

Performance comparison between exchange-traded funds and closed-end country funds

The objective of this study is to compare the risk and return performance of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) available for foreign markets and closed-end country funds. We utilize 29 closed-end country funds (CEFs) for 14 countries over the sample period from April 1996 to December 2001. The performance proxies are mean returns and risk-adjusted returns. Results indicate that ETFs exhibit higher mean returns and higher Sharpe ratios than foreign closed-end funds, while CEFs exhibit negative alphas. This indicates that a passive investment strategy utilizing ETFs may be superior to an active investment strategy using CEFs. The findings reported here offer some insight on the relative advantages of each type of investment. Specifically, there may be some potential for additional types of ETFs that offer higher risk-adjusted returns than closed-end funds. Such ETFs may be able to offer higher risk-adjusted returns as part of an internationally diversified portfolio.     

Mutual fund performance with learning across funds

The average level and cross-sectional variability of fund alphas are estimated from a large sample of mutual funds. This information is incorporated, along with the usual regression estimate of alpha, in a (roughly) precision-weighted average measure of individual fund performance. Substantial “learning across funds” is documented, with significant effects on investment decisions. In a Bayesian framework, this form of learning is inconsistent with the assumption, made in the past literature, of prior independence across funds. Independence can be viewed as an extreme scenario in which the true cross-sectional distribution of alphas is presumed to be known a priori.     

International Islamic funds

Internationally‐investing Islamic equity funds from developed Islamic and non‐Islamic markets perform in general similar to the market. However, analyzing different market conditions, we provide evidence that funds domiciled in Islamic markets outperform their peers and funds from non‐Islamic markets during market turmoil, irrespective of the applied performance measurement model. We suggest that this outperformance is owed to the expertise of fund managers from developed Islamic markets who operate in a financial environment that is driven by Islamic principles. Our results are robust with respect to the standard Fama‐French three‐factor and four‐factor models as well as to the novel five‐factor model.     

Public hedge funds

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly under-perform funds managed by unlisted firms. The under-performance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or those managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the under-performance, listed asset management firms raise more capital, by growing existing funds and launching new funds post listing, and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.     

The performance and diversification benefits of funds of hedge funds

We examine the performance and diversification potential of 332 funds of hedge funds (FOHFs) for the period from January 1990 to May 2003. Consistent with prior studies, we find that FOHFs appear to underperform the hedge fund index on a risk-adjusted basis. However, FOHFs have characteristics that offset their apparent underperformance. Their returns do not suffer from negative skewness that is a feature of many hedge fund strategies. Relative to the hedge fund index, we find that FOHFs have lower correlations with stock indices in both bull and bear markets, making them a better diversification tool in equity portfolios. For bond portfolios, however, FOHFs have no diversification advantage over hedge fund indexing.     

高盛董事长:重拾信心

在经历了"9·11"恐怖袭击事件带来的严峻挑战后,去年秋末安龙公司的倒闭以及由此引发的安达信事件,使美国的经济体系正面临着另一个挑战,即企业诚信危机.     

Synthetic hedge funds

We provide evidence on the performance and the replication success of a broad sample of 72 synthetic hedge funds from January 2009 to December 2013. Thereby, we assign the term “synthetic hedge fund” to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with hedge fund indices as their benchmarks. Replication success is measured through different perspectives from distributional characteristics to risk-adjusted performance. We find an overall significant underperformance of synthetic hedge funds compared to an appropriate benchmark index. Furthermore, mutual funds (associated with active portfolio management) can produce return characteristics closer to hedge fund benchmarks than exchange-traded funds (associated with passive management) can. From a single strategy perspective, we find a picture of heterogeneity. Regarding the market environment, we show larger return differences for unusual market conditions than for regular ones.     

The performance of hedge funds and mutual funds in emerging markets

Use of short selling and derivatives is limited in most emerging markets because such instruments are not as readily available as they are in developed capital markets. These limitations raise questions about the value added provided by hedge funds, especially compared to traditional mutual funds active in these markets. We use five existing performance measurement models plus a new asset-style factor model to identify the return sources and the alpha generated by both types of funds. We analyze subperiods, different market environments, and structural breaks. Our results indicate that some hedge funds generate significant positive alpha, whereas most mutual funds do not outperform traditional benchmarks. We find that hedge funds are more active in shifting their asset allocation. The higher degree of freedom that hedge funds enjoy in their investment style might thus be one explanation for the differences in performance.     

养老基金的社会责任投资

社会责任投资(SR I)作为一种全新的投资理念,将社会、环境、人权等因素纳入融资标准。在倡导可持续性发展的今天,面对金融市场的种种不确定性因素,将这一理念引入到养老基金的投资决策中,无论从理论或实践的角度,都具有深远意义。本文从基本概念入手,考察了社会责任投资的发展轨迹,并从理论角度对其先进性和有效性进行探讨,进而分析了将SR I引入到养老基金投资中的可行性,最后结合国际经验和我国现实,提出了中国养老基金社会责任投资的政策建议。     

Competition among mutual funds

We examine the impact of the entry of new mutual funds on incumbents using the overlap in their portfolio holdings as a measure of competitive intensity. This simple metric delivers powerful economic results. Incumbents that have a high overlap with entrants subsequently engage in price competition by reducing management fees. Distribution fees, however, rise so that investors do not benefit as much from price competition. Funds with high overlap also experience quantity competition through lower investor flows, have lower alphas, and higher attrition rates. These effects only appear after the late 1990s, at which point there appears to be an endogenous structural shift in the competitive environment. We conclude that the mutual fund market has evolved into one that displays the hallmark features of a competitive market.     

On investment in funds

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine how large a capital risk a monetary institution is incurring by receiving capital payments under obligation to yield a fixed guaranteed interest until a prescribed date, even if the market rate of interest should fall below the rate guaranteed, and to investigate to what extent the risk is decreased if it is possible to invest the payment first received at a rate of interest exceeding the rate guaranteed.     

金融双语——一种进化型投资——生命周期基金

如果能找到一种一劳永逸的投资工具——一种随着人们年龄增长和风险承受能力降低而自动调整投资组合的产品，大多数人都会为之欣喜。现在的确有这样一种产品：生命周期共同基金。生命周期基金又称为“目标退休基金”，是一种以股票和固定收益项目为投资组合的“基金的基金”。生命周期基金的特别之处在于，它整体的资产配置会随着你退休日期的临近而调整成更趋保守的组合。这是一个自然而又合乎心意的进程：你距离退休日期越近，你在股票市场的投资就越少，在收益稳定的证券上的投资就越多。     

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.     

Emerging market hedge funds: Do they perform like regular hedge funds?

In this study, we investigate whether the performance of emerging market hedge funds (EMHFs) follow a pattern similar to that reported for advanced market hedge funds. In contrast to the pre-2007 period, our results for the post-2006 period show that EMHFs exhibit performance patterns similar to those reported for hedge funds that focus on the developed markets. Unlike in the pre-2007 period, EMHFs in general do not exhibit significant exposure to specific asset classes in the post-2006 period. On a risk-adjusted basis, we find that EMHFs do not consistently outperform the benchmarks. The reported performance patterns may provide useful insights to both academics and portfolio managers.     

‘Open-ending’ closed-end funds

Open-ending a closed-end fund forces the price of the fund's shares to their net asset value. Open-ending behavior is shown to correspond in predictable ways to the incentive to open-end and to potential resistance to open-ending. Moreover, closed-end fund share prices begin to generate statistically significant positive abnormal returns well in advance of the formal announcement of the open-ending. Although a small part of the total abnormal return is not entirely exhausted until after the announcement, such market price performance is broadly consistent with a semi-strong form efficient market.     

Closed-end funds and sentiment risk

Irradional noise traders earn high returns for bearing risk that they themselves create. Diversifying across closed-end funds does little to reduce this risk, because discounts are correlated across funds. But diversification between closed-end funds and large-cap stocks does reduce this risk, especially when markets are not subject to major shocks: a combination of closed-end funds and large-cap stocks has lower risk than either one alone. To the extent that fund shares and large-cap stocks are partially segmented markets, large-cap stocks thus provide some protection against the sentiment risk created by noise traders. This paper estimates the amount of large-cap stocks needed in tax-deferred portfolios, under various amounts of market-wide risk, and ways of measuring it.     

Short interest in exchange-traded funds

Short selling exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has become a common means of speculating or hedging in response to pessimistic expectations about a specific market or sector, as the short interest of ETFs is more than 10 times that of individual stocks, on average. We determine that sector-based ETFs have an abnormally large short interest level, whereas international ETFs have an unusually small short interest level. The level of short interest is larger for ETFs that have a higher trading volume and a lower market capitalization, regardless of the type of ETF assessed. The level of short interest is lower for ETFs representing indexes that have tradable derivatives, but higher for international ETFs representing indexes that have tradable derivatives. We also determine that the level of short interest in an ETF serves as an effective signal of bearish sentiment when considering all ETFs, but is not an effective signal when isolating any particular type of ETF.