Investing in Hedge Funds

This book will present a comprehensive view of the risk characteristics, risk-adjusted performances, and risk exposures of various hedge fund indices. It will distinguish itself from other books and journal articles by focusing solely on hedge fund indices and emphasizing tail risk as a predictor of hedge fund index returns. The three chapters in this short book have not been previously published.

• Presents new insights about the investability and performance measurement of an investor’s final portfolio
• Uses most recently developed investable hedge fund indexes to revise previous analyses of indexes
• Focuses on 14 distinct types of hedge fund indices with daily data from January 1994 to December 2011

Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and professionals worldwide working on financial investments, and on hedge funds in particular.

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 What Are Hedge Funds?

1.2 The History and the Future

1.3 Academic Perspective

1.4 The Aim of the Book

Chapter 2. Hedge Fund Strategies

2.1 Event-Driven Strategies

2.2 Equity Hedge Strategies

2.3 Relative Value Strategies

2.4 Global Macro Strategies

2.5 Other Strategies

2.6 Funds of Hedge Funds

Chapter 3. Hedge Fund Databases, Biases, and Indices

3.1 Hedge Fund Data Biases

3.2 Hedge Fund Databases and Indices

3.3 Hedge Fund Index Return Distributions

Chapter 4. Risk-Adjusted Performances of Hedge Fund Indices

4.1 Sharpe Ratio

4.2 Sortino Ratio

4.3 Return to VaR Ratio

4.4 Calmar Ratio

Chapter 5. Determinants of Hedge Fund Index Returns

5.1 Predictability of Hedge Fund Index Returns by Moments of the Return Distribution

5.2 Predictability of Hedge Fund Index Returns by Exposures to Macroeconomic Risk Factors

References