Research and publications
The Impact of Non-Normality Risks and Tactical Trading on Hedge Fund Alphas
This paper highlights the importance of non-normality risks and tactical asset allocation in assessing hedge fund performance. As such, it underlines the inaccuracies of previous papers on hedge fund performance that ignored higher moments in the distribution of hedge fund returns and assumed constant asset allocation. Correcting for these shortcomings, the authors find that failure to account for non-normality risks and tactical asset allocation on average leads to an overstatement of performance by 1.54% and to incorrect statistical inference on the performance of 1 out of 4 funds. On average, non-normality risks and conditional asset allocation explain 23.1% of the abnormal performance of hedge funds as commonly perceived. A revisited version of this paper was published in the Spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Alternative Investments.
Author(s):
Harry M. Kat, Joëlle Miffre
Summary:
This paper highlights the importance of non-normality risks and tactical asset allocation in assessing hedge fund performance. As such, it underlines the inaccuracies of previous papers on hedge fund performance that ignored higher moments in the distribution of hedge fund returns and assumed constant asset allocation. Correcting for these shortcomings, the authors find that failure to account for non-normality risks and tactical asset allocation on average leads to an overstatement of performance by 1.54% and to incorrect statistical inference on the performance of 1 out of 4 funds. On average, non-normality risks and conditional asset allocation explain 23.1% of the abnormal performance of hedge funds as commonly perceived. A revisited version of this paper was published in the Spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Alternative Investments.
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Register/Log in| Type : | Working paper |
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| Date : | 05/08/2006 |
| Keywords : |
Alternative Investments |
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