I have written in the past that the hedge fund industry didn’t make sense to me. Returns seemed too correlated to equities and they didn’t offer value given their fee structure.
Then the shakeout began. Hedge funds blew up or started to close left and right (see this).
There is a recent WSJ article about the continuing shakeout in the hedge fund industry. Key quote from one commentator: “We used to invest in hedge funds because we got stocklike returns with bondlike volatility. Now we're getting bondlike returns with stocklike volatility."
The problem was expectations were too high, hedge funds got over-sold and the field got too crowded. Here is a study of well-known managers (John Neff at Windsor Fund, Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, George Soros and Jimmy Rogers at Quantum, Julian Robertson at Tiger, Ford Foundation) showing the Sharpe ratio of these top investors were no better than 1.0. In retrospect, some of those hedge fund marketing claims of high returns with Sharpe ratios of 2.0 or more seem overblown.
Today, the justification for hedge fund investing continues to be out of whack. Note this quote from the WSJ article:
Overall, the $1.9 trillion hedge-fund industry is holding up. The average fund is flat this year, through May, according to Hedge Fund Research. That beats the decline of 3.80% in the Standard & Poor's 500 in that period, though it's below the gain of 0.94% in the Lehman Brothers bond index. Last year, the average hedge fund gained 10%, compared with returns of 5.5% for the S&P 500 and 7.8% for the Lehman index.
An institution invests in alternative vehicles because they offer attractive risk-return characteristics, usually returns that are similar to their other asset classes but at a lower level of correlation. Today we have an industry delivering returns that are highly correlated to equities, but their justification for keeping their jobs is that they outperformed the S&P500??? If that the case, how about institutional equity-like fees (say 50 basis points)?
4 comments:
How does your chart look if you go back to before the 5 year bull market that started March 2003?
This correlation is probably accurate as well as the observation that the Hedge fund space has become saturated. Funds can easily pump up marketable factors such as sharpe ratios with an event-driven short-term holding strategy. There are many Forex oriented funds which implement this technique already, and it wouldn't suprise me if the strategy was used for equities. The reason why many of the aforementioned funds have sharpe ratios around 1 is because of their constant HPR, rather than quick trades.
Patrick
Tim
There are no hedge fund indices with daily unit values that go back any further.
There are some with monthly returns that do go back. Correlations have generally been rising. The HF AUM explosion occurred after the NASDAQ peak - when equities fell but HFs didn't. As a result there was a flood of money into hedge funds as it was thought to be highly diversifying.
The trend is towards mega funds as the industry matures. Alpha magazine points out that the top 100 funds by AuM now control 75% of total industry assets, compared to less 50% in 2002 when they first conducted their annual survey.
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