AN EVALUATION OF HEDGE FUNDS: RISK, RETURN AND PITFALLS

Hedge Funds: Risk and Return

ince the early 1990s, hedge funds have become an increasingly popular asset class. The amount invested globally in hedge funds rose from approximately $50 billion in 1990 to approximately $1 trillion by the end of 2004.1 And because these funds characteristically use substantial leverage, they play a far more important role in the global securities markets than the size of their net assets indi...

Systemic Risk and Hedge Funds∗

Systemic risk is commonly used to describe the possibility of a series of correlated defaults among financial institutions—typically banks—that occur over a short period of time, often caused by a single major event. However, since the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, it has become clear that hedge funds are also involved in systemic risk exposures. The hedge-fund industry has ...

Evaluation of Hedge Funds Performance

An Introduction to Hedge Funds

This report was originally written as an industry white paper on Hedge Funds. This paper gives an overview to Hedge Funds, with a focus on risk management issues. We define and explain the general characteristics of Hedge Funds, their main investment strategies and the risk models employed. We address the problems in Hedge Fund modelling, survey current Hedge Funds available on the market and t...

Dynamic risk exposures in hedge funds

We measure dynamic risk exposure of hedge funds to various risk factors during different market volatility conditions using the regime-switching beta model. We find that in the high-volatility regime (when the market is rolling-down) most of the strategies are negatively and significantly exposed to the Large-Small and Credit Spread risk factors. This suggests that liquidity risk and credit ris...