Following a growing concern among investors about the quality of hedge fund index return data, and given the lack of capacity and transparency specific to that industry, this paper questions from an academic perspective whether it is feasible or not to design hedge fund benchmarks satisfying all defining properties for a good index. In particular, in an attempt to test whether achieving investability necessarily comes at the cost of representatitivity, as sometimes claimed by hedge fund index providers, we borrow from the asset pricing literature the concept of factor replicating portfolios and apply it to the benchmarking of hedge fund style returns. A revisited version of this paper was published in the March 2007 issue of European Financial Management.
Following a growing concern among investors about the quality of hedge fund index return data, and given the lack of capacity and transparency specific to that industry, this paper questions from an academic perspective whether it is feasible or not to design hedge fund benchmarks satisfying all defining properties for a good index. In particular, in an attempt to test whether achieving investability necessarily comes at the cost of representatitivity, as sometimes claimed by hedge fund index providers, we borrow from the asset pricing literature the concept of factor replicating portfolios and apply it to the benchmarking of hedge fund style returns. A revisited version of this paper was published in the March 2007 issue of European Financial Management.
Type : | Working paper |
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Date : | 09/11/2004 |
Keywords : |
Indexes |