Volume 2, No. 4, Fourth Quarter 2004

Practitioner’s Digest • Vol. 2, No. 4

The “Practitioners Digest” emphasizes the practical significance of manuscripts featured in the “Insights” and “Articles” sections of the journal. Readers who are interested in extracting the practical value of an article, or who are simply looking for a summary, may look to this section.

Fees on Fees in Funds of Funds

by: Stephen J. Brown, William N. Goetzmann and Bing Liang

Funds of funds are an increasingly popular avenue for hedge fund investment. Despite the increasing interest in hedge funds as an alternative asset class, the high degree of fund-specific risk and the lack of transparency may give fiduciaries pause. In addition, many of the most attractive hedge funds are closed to new investment. Funds of funds resolve these issues by providing investors with diversification across manager styles and professional oversight of fund operations that can provide the necessary degree of due diligence. In addition, many such funds hold shares in hedge funds otherwise closed to new investment allowing smaller investors access to the most sought-after managers. However, the diversification, oversight and access comes at the cost of a multiplication of the fees paid by the investor. One would expect that the information advantage of funds of funds would more than compensate investors for these fees. Unfortunately, individual hedge funds dominate fund of funds on an after-fee return or Sharpe ratio basis. In this paper we argue that the disappointing after-fee performance of some fund of funds might be explained by the nature of this fee arrangement, and that fund of funds providers may actually benefit from considering other possible fee arrangements. These alternative arrangements will improve reported performance and may make funds of funds more attractive to a growing institutional clientele.

Extracting Portable Alphas from Equity Long/Short Hedge Funds

by: William Fung and David A. Hsieh

This paper shows empirically that Equity Long/Short (Equity L/S) hedge funds have significant alpha to both conventional as well as alternative (hedge fund-like) risk factors utilizing hedge fund data from three major data bases. Following the terminology introduced in Fung and Hsieh (2003) Journal of Fixed Income 58, 16-27, we call these Equity alternative alphas (or Equity AAs for short). Equity AAs are extracted from Equity L/S hedge fund returns by first identifying the systematic risk factors inherent in their strategies. Hedging out these systematic risk factors, the resultant AA return series are empirically shown to be independent of systematic risks during normal as well as stressful conditions in asset markets. This provides collaborative evidence that AA returns are portable across conventional asset-class indices. By modeling the AA return series as GARCH(1,1)vAR(1) processes, it is shown that the unconditional return distributions are normal with time-varying variance free of serial correlations, skewness, and kurtosis. Alpha-enhanced equity alternative are constructed admitting higher mean return, better annual returns, and Sharpe ratios to the S&P 500 index over the sample period 1996-2002.

Alternative Investments: CTAs, Hedge Funds, and Funds-of-Funds

by: Bing Liang

In this paper, we study alternative investment vehicles such as hedge funds, funds-of-funds, and commodity trading advisors (CTAs) by investigating their performance, risk, and fund characteristics. Considering them as three distinctive investment classes, we study them not only on a stand-alone basis but also on a portfolio basis.We find several interesting results. First, CTAs differ from hedge funds and funds-of-funds in terms of trading strategies, liquidity, and correlation structures. Second, during the period 1994v2001, hedge funds outperform funds-of-funds, which in turn outperform CTAs on a stand-alone basis. These results can be explained by the double fee structure but not survivorship bias. Third, correlation structures for alternative investment vehicles are different under different market conditions. Hedge funds are highly correlated to each other and are not well hedged in the down markets with liquidity squeeze. The negative correlations with other instruments make CTAs suitable hedging instruments for insuring downside risk. When adding CTAs to the hedge fund portfolio or the fund-of-fund portfolio, investors can benefit significantly from the risk-return trade-off.

The Dangers of Mechanical Investment Decision-Making: The Case of Hedge Funds

by: Harry M. Kat

Over the last 20 years, investors have come to approach investment decision-making in an increasingly mechanical manner. Optimizers are filled up with historical return data and the "optimal" portfolio follows almost automatically. In this paper, we argue that such an approach can be extremely dangerous, especially when alternative investments such as hedge funds are involved. Proper hedge fund investing requires a much more elaborate approach to investment decision-making than currently in use by most investors. The available data on hedge funds should not be taken at face value, but should first be corrected for various types of biases and autocorrelation. Tools like mean-variance analysis and the Sharpe ratio that many investors have become accustomed to over the years are no longer appropriate when hedge funds are involved as they concentrate on the good part while completely skipping over the bad part of the hedge fund story. Investors also have to find a way to figure in the long lock-up and advance notice periods, which makes hedge fund investments highly illiquid. In addition, investors will have to give weight to the fact that without more insight in the way in which hedge funds generate their returns it is very hard to say something sensible about hedge funds' future longer-run performance. The tools to accomplish this formally are not all there yet, meaning that more than ever investors will have to rely on common sense and doing their homework.

AIRAP – Alternative RAPMs for Alternative Investments

by: Milind Sharma

This paper highlights the inadequacies of traditional RAPMs (risk-adjusted performance measures) and proposes AIRAP (alternative investments risk-adjusted performance), based on Expected Utility theory, as a RAPM better suited to alternative investments. AIRAP is the implied certain return that a risk-averse investor would trade off for holding risky assets. AIRAP captures the full distribution, penalizes for volatility and leverage, is customizable by risk aversion, works with negative mean returns, eschews moment estimation or convergence requirements, and can dovetail with stressed scenarios or regime-switching models. A modified Sharpe ratio is proposed. The results are contrasted with Sharpe, Treynor, and Jensen rankings to show significant divergence. Evidence of non-normality and the tradeoff between meanvvariance merits vis-a-vis higher moment risks is noted. The dependence of optimal leverage on risk aversion and track record is noted. The results have implications for manager selection and fund of hedge funds portfolio construction.

Sifting Through the Wreckage: Lessons from Recent Hedge-Fund Liquidations

by: Mila Getmansky, Andrew W. Lo and Shauna X. Mei

We document the empirical properties of a sample of 1,765 funds in the TASS Hedge Fund database from 1977 to 2004 that are no longer active. The TASS sample shows that attrition rates differ significantly across investment styles, from a low of 5.2% per year on average for convertible arbitrage funds to a high of 14.4% per year on average for managed futures funds. We relate a number of factors to these attrition rates, including past performance, volatility, and investment style, and also document differences in illiquidity risk between active and liquidated funds. We conclude with a proposal for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to play a new role in promoting greater transparency and stability in the hedge-fund industry.

The Fed Watchers

by: Jack L. Treynor

“Case Studies” presents a case pertinent to contemporary issues and events in investment management. Insightful and provocative questions are posed at the end of each case to challenge the reader. Each case is an invitation to the critical thinking and pragmatic problem solving that are so fundamental to the practice of investment management.

The Wisdom of Crowds

by: James Surowiecki • reviewed by: Craig W. French

The Oxford Guide to Financial Modeling

by: Thomas S.Y. Ho and Sang Bin Lee • reviewed by: Mark Kritzman

“Book Reviews” identifies important, and often popular, new books from a wide range of investment topics. Beyond providing a summary and review of the content and style of the books, “Book Reviews” seeks to contribute to a conscious, critical, and informed approach to investment literature.

Venture Capital Syndication

by: Sanjiv R. Das, Hoje Jo and Yongtae Kim

“Surveys& Crossovers” This section provides surveys of the literature in investment management or short papers exemplifying advances in finance that arise from the confluence with other fields. This section acknowledges current trends in technology, and the cross-disciplinary nature of the investment management business, while directing the reader to interesting and important recent work.