Hedge Fund Alphas: Do They Reflect Managerial Skills or Mere Compensation for Liquidity Risk Bearing?

Author(s):  
Rajna Gibson ◽  
Songtao Wang
2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajna Gibson Brandon ◽  
Songtao Wang

AbstractThis article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of equity hedge fund portfolios. Similarly to Avramov, Kosowski, Naik, and Teo (2007), (2011), we observe that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills generate superior performance. This outperformance disappears or weakens substantially for most emerging markets, event-driven, and long/short hedge fund portfolios once we account for liquidity risk. Moreover, we show that the equity market-neutral and long/short hedge fund portfolios’ “alphas” also entail rents for their service as liquidity providers. These results hold under various robustness tests.


Author(s):  
Adam L. Aiken ◽  
Christopher P. Clifford ◽  
Jesse A. Ellis ◽  
Qiping Huang

2017 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 1750002
Author(s):  
Hany A. Shawky ◽  
Ying Wang

Using data from the Lipper TASS hedge fund database over the period 1994–2012, we examine the role of liquidity risk in explaining the relation between asset size and hedge fund performance. While a significant negative size-performance relation exists for all hedge funds, once we stratify our sample by liquidity risk, we find that such a relationship only exists among funds with the highest liquidity risk. Liquidity risk is found to be another important source of diseconomies of scale in the hedge fund industry. Evidently, for high liquidity risk funds, large funds are less able to recover from the relatively more significant losses incurred during market-wide liquidity crises, resulting in lower performance for large funds relative to small funds.


Author(s):  
Adam L. Aiken ◽  
Christopher P. Clifford ◽  
Jesse A. Ellis ◽  
Qiping Huang

Abstract We exploit the expiring nature of hedge fund lockups to create a new measure of funding liquidity risk that varies within funds. We find that hedge funds with lower funding risk generate higher returns, and this effect is driven by their increased exposure to equity-mispricing anomalies. Our results are robust to a variety of sampling criteria, variable definitions, and control variables. Further, we address endogeneity concerns in various ways, including a placebo approach and regression discontinuity design. Collectively, our results support a causal link between funding risk and the ability of managers to engage in risky arbitrage.


Author(s):  
Ashrafee T. Hossain ◽  
Samir Saadi ◽  
Maxim Treff

Managerial skill is a key determinant of a hedge fund’s success. Identifying the key characteristics of successful managers is important because of a strong relation between hedge fund performance and managerial skills. This chapter provides a brief history of some highly successful hedge fund managers as well as a discussion of the different demands of the hedge fund industry versus other pooled investments, such as mutual funds. Furthermore, the chapter examines the differences between hedge fund and mutual fund managers involving return expectations, performance measures, and compensation. Next the chapter explores the key characteristics that hedge fund managers should possess to be successful. Although some characteristics are easy to identify and measure, others are less so. The chapter also includes a detailed discussion of social versus human capital.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document