Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
5-2002
Abstract
Hedge funds are collective investment vehicles fast becoming popular with high net worth individuals as well as institutional investors. These are funds that are often established with a special legal status that allows their investment managers a free hand to use derivatives, short sell, and exploit leverage to raise returns and cushion risk. Given that that they have substantial latitude to invest, it is instructive to examine the performance of hedge funds compared to other forms of managed funds. This paper provides an overview of hedge funds and discusses their empirical risk and return profiles. It also poses some concerns regarding the empirical measurements. Given the complexity of hedge fund investments, meaningful analytical methods are required to provide greater risk transparency and performance reporting. Hedge fund performance is also beset by a number of practical issues generating "practical risks". These risks are not fully addressed by the usual risk-adjusted performance measures in the literature. A penalty function to discount these extraneous risk dimensions is proposed. The paper concludes that further empirical work is required to provide informative statistics about the risk and return of hedge funds.
Keywords
hedge funds, performance measurement, risks and returns, Sortino, Hurst, risk-adjusted measures
Discipline
Finance and Financial Management | Portfolio and Security Analysis
Research Areas
Finance
First Page
1
Last Page
28
Citation
KOH, Francis; KOH, Winston T. H.; LEE, David Kuo Chuen; and PHOON, Kok Fai.
Investing in hedge funds: Risks, returns and Pitfalls. (2002). 1-28.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/2341
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.