Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Hedge funds – Evaluation'

Hedge funds are private investment funds characterized by unconventional strategies. This thesis employed multi-factor CAPM to evaluate the performance, or manager skill of hedge funds investment segments by using CSFB/Tremont Hedge Fund Indices from January 1994 to September 2005. The performance evaluation is based on the concept of ¡°Jansen¡¯s alpha¡±, which is estimated by applying Generalized Method of Moment. The finding is that hedge funds industry in general displayed the ability to outperform market proxy. Global Macro shows the strongest manager skill, followed by Event Driven, Equity Market Neutral and Long/Short Equity. This thesis also investigates the consistency of hedge funds performance over market environment. It was discovered that the hedge funds industry in general and all the sub-category investment segments except Convertibly Arbitrage, Emerging Market and Fix income Arbitrage displayed the ability to cushion the impact of financial shocks.

In this thesis it is developed and demonstrated the workings of a copula-based technique that allows the derivation of dynamic trading strategies, which generate returns with statistical properties similar to hedge funds. It is shown that this technique is not only capable of replicating fund of funds returns, but is equally well suited for the replication of individual hedge fund returns. Since replication is accomplished by trading futures on traditional assets only, it avoids the usual drawbacks surrounding hedge fund investments, including the need for extensive due diligence, liquidity, capacity, transparency and style drift problems, as well as excessive management fees. This replication technique is also used to evaluate the net-of-fee performance of 875 funds of hedge funds and 2073 individual hedge funds, up to an including November 2006. Comparing fund returns with the returns on dynamic futures trading strategies with the same risk and dependence characteristics, no more than 18.6% of the funds of funds and 22.5% of the individual hedge funds in the data sample convincingly beat the benclunark. Besides the replication and evaluation of funds which already exist in the market, this technology can also be used to create new funds with previously unavailable return characteristics, the so-called `synthetic funds'. In a set of four out-ofsample tests over the period January 1998 - February 2007, it is shown that the replication-based strategies are indeed capable of accurately generating returns with a variety of properties, including negative correlation with stocks and bonds and high positive skewness. The synthetic funds also produce impressive average excess returns. Disappointing performance is leading hedge fund investors to look for cheaper alternatives to invest, such as indices of hedge funds. Unfortunately, investable hedge fund indices are nothing more than funds of funds in disguise, with performance similar or even worse than real funds of funds. The replication technology generates returns with statistical properties very similar to those of hedge fund indices, and a higher average return for most hedge fund categories, but without actually investing in hedge funds.

This thesis examines the degree to which alternative funds deviate from their style-benchmark and how this is related to past performance and fund size, and how it impacts future risk and returns. Additionally the thesis examines how security selection and market timing skills differ across varying degrees of deviation from the benchmark. The thesis uses data for hedge funds, funds of funds, and CTA funds from the Center for International Securities and Derivatives Markets and employs fund???s tracking error relative to their style-benchmark to estimate the level of drift. The style-benchmarks used are the median return for all reporting funds that follow a particular style and funds are assigned a benchmark based on their self-reported style. First, this thesis documents statistically significant differences in the tracking errors of portfolios of funds with the highest tracking error versus funds with the lowest tracking error, implying that some managers drift from their self-reported style-benchmarks. Second, funds??? benchmark-inconsistency is less severe in the case of funds that have a regulatory obligation to disclose their performance, suggesting that the absence of regulation fosters an environment where managers can be more flexible with their investment approach. Third, the tendency to drift from the benchmark is most prevalent amongst funds with superior past performance as well as small funds. Fourth, future total portfolio risk increases as funds display more benchmarkinconsistency, suggesting that managers adopt riskier strategies as they attempt to enhance returns. Fifth, the thesis demonstrates that CTA funds that display drift from their benchmark produce higher absolute and relative returns in subsequent periods regardless of the direction of the general market. In contrast, the findings show for hedge funds and funds of funds, benchmark-inconsistent funds are likely to outperform in bull markets and underperform in bear markets. Finally, this thesis shows that more benchmark-consistent managers have better security selection skill. The main contribution of this thesis is in identifying the group of hedge funds, funds of funds, and CTA funds that are likely to deviate from their self-reported style-benchmark and the risk-return consequences of such deviations. The findings have implications for investors and regulators.

Dans l’environnement financier d’après crise, le business model des hedge funds semble remis en cause. La crise a en effet révélé leur incapacité à générer du rendement absolu puisqu’ils sont corrélés aux marchés financiers. La prétention d’en être décorrélée ne tient pas en effet, au début de l’année 20l0, la performance des hedge funds était parallèle à celle des actions, qui ont enregistré une hausse fin 2009. Aujourd’hui la tendance est d’avantage à la stagnation, à l’instar des hedge funds. Ils ont eu des difficultés à se rétablir et à dégager des profils exceptionnels, indépendamment de la conjoncture financière. C’est pourquoi l’évaluation et l’analyse de la performance représentent des éléments de recherche qu’on examine à travers cette thèse. Ce travail de recherche offre aux investisseurs, aux risk managers, ou encore aux autorités de régulation des marchés, une réponse à plusieurs interrogations, à savoir, l’attribution des performances absolues dans l’industrie hedge funds est-elle « vrai » ou il s ’agit d ’un phénomène de marketing ? Quelle est la relation entre les rendements des hedge funds et l’évolution des marchés financiers ? Comment expliquer la différence des rentabilités des stratégies hedge funds ?
In the post-crisis financial environment, the business model of hedge funds seems challenged. The crisis has revealed their inability to générérer absolute return since they are correlated with financial markets. Pretending to be uncorrelated does not in fact, at the beginning of 2010; the hedge fund performance was parallel to that of actions, which rose late 2009. Today the trend is of benefit to the stagnation, like hedge funds. They had difficulty réatblir and release profiles exceptional indépedemment financial conditions. This is why the evaluation and analysis of the performance represent elements of research that examines through this thesis. This research provides investors, risk managers, or regulators to market a response to several interrogations, namely, the assignment of absolute performance in the hedge fund industry is it "true" or it is a marketing phenomenon? What is the relationship between hedge fund returns and financial markets? How to explain the difference in returns of hedge fund strategies?

The 2007–2009 financial crisis led to a decrease in consumer and investor confidence worldwide (SARB, 2008:2). Along with the weakened business sentiment and consumer demand, tightened funding conditions in financial markets, increased inflationary pressures, and declining global manufacturing activities, the world economic recession that followed the collapse of the world financial sector led to an estimated wealth destruction of approximately US$50 trillion (SARB, 2008:2; Aisen & Franken, 2010:3; Karunanayake et al., 2010). Apart from this estimate, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also projected that the global bank balance sheets in advanced countries suffered losses of approximately US$4 trillion during the period 2009–2010 (Aisen & Franken, 2010:3). As a result, investors have become more risk-adverse (Guiso et al., 2013:1), and the consequences of the financial crisis, made insurable profitable investment decisions extremely difficult as market volatility tends to increase during crises periods (Karunanayake et al., 2010; Schwert, 1989:83). With the financial environment in distress, some fund managers consider equities as the preferred asset class to protect the purchasing power of their clients (Ivan, 2013). However, the studies of Ennis and Sebastian (2003) and Nicholas (2004) found evidence that hedge funds will outperform equity markets during a downswing in financial markets. In addition, hedge funds are considered market-neutral due to these investment funds’ unrestricted investment flexibility and more efficient market timing abilities (Ennis & Sebastian, 2003). Hedge funds are also considered to be more unconventional assets for improving portfolio diversification (Lamm, 1999:87), where the variation of investment strategies available in a hedge fund has the ability to satisfy investors with several different risk preferences (Shin, 2012). Still, a number of previous studies have debated conflicting evidence regarding the performance of hedge funds and the persistence in outperforming other markets. This led to the objective of this study; to evaluate the risk-adjusted performance of US and EU hedge funds compared to the associated world equity markets over the 2007–2009 financial crisis. The evidence from this study confirmed the dominance of hedge funds over the CAC 40, DAX, S&P 500 and Dow Jones, from 2004 to 2011, emphasising that the performance of the US and EU hedge funds would overshadow a normal buy-and-hold strategy on the world equity markets under investigation. Overall, the Sharpe-, Sortino-, Jensen’s alpha-, Treynor- and Calmar ratios illustrated that US hedge funds outperformed both EU hedge funds and the associated equity markets over this period. The presence of non-normality among the return distributions led to the use of the Omega ratio as the proper benchmark, which also confirmed the outperformance of US hedge funds over EU hedge funds and associated world equity markets.
MCom (Risk Management), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

Mestrado em Finanças
As carteiras de investimento tradicionais são focadas apenas em duas classes de ativos: Ações e Obrigações. Nas últimas décadas as carteiras institucionais, e de investidores privados, para perfis de risco equilibrados têm colocado o foco em 60% de ações globais, usualmente através do índice americano S&P500, e em 40% de obrigações através do índice Barclays US Aggregate Bond. A componente de obrigações tende a baixar a volatilidade das ações, resultando numa menor volatilidade destas carteiras. Dadas as atuais baixas taxas de juros, e as baixas yields das obrigações, esta classe de ativos poderá aumentar a sua volatilidade contribuindo para um maior risco destas carteiras. Posto isto, poderá fazer sentido aumentar a exposição a outros instrumentos financeiros por forma a diversificar estas carteiras e diminuir os riscos sistemáticos dos mercados financeiros. Torna-se assim necessário considerar alternativas de investimento, com o objetivo de obter retornos ajustados ao risco na constituição de carteiras de investimento. Os fundos de investimento de retorno absoluto, ou hedge funds, podem constituir alternativas de investimento válidas em períodos de alta volatilidade, e têm ganho visibilidade originando um aumento da procura, ou seja, a um aumento dos ativos sobre gestão. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo estudar a combinação de índices investíveis de Hedge Funds numa carteira tradicional de 60% de ações e 40% de obrigações. Pretende-se determinar a carteira de variância mínima e de Markowitz e os respetivos pesos dos índices de hedge funds na carteira de referência e comparar a sua performance.
Traditional investment portfolios are focused only on two asset classes: Stocks and Bonds. In recent decades institutional portfolios and private investors have, for balanced risk profiles, focused on 60% of global stock usually through the US S&P500 and 40% bonds through the Barclays US Aggregate Bond Index. Therefore, it is necessary to increase exposure to other financial instruments in order to diversify these portfolios and reduce systemic risks in financial markets. If so, investors should consider adding alternatives to their traditional investments as a way to potentially reduce their portfolios sensitivity to financial markets. It is therefore necessary to consider investment alternatives, in order to get adjusted returns to risk in setting up investment portfolios. Absolute return funds or hedge funds, may present a valid alternative investment in times of high volatility, and have gained visibility in periods of bear markets compared to stock index funds, consequently leading to an increase in demand, i.e., an increase of assets under management for these assets. This study aims to analyze the combination of investable indices of hedge funds in a traditional portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds. It is intended to determine the minimum variance portfolio and Markowitz and the respective weights of hedge fund indices in the reference portfolio and compare their performance considering time windows of two, five and ten years.

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Mutual funds performance evaluation is, traditionally, made using Sharpe Ratio that considers only the first and the second moments of the return distribution (mean and variance), but it requires assumptions on the normality of the returns distribution and on the investor’s utility function as quadratic. However, it is well known that a quadratic utility function is inconsistent with investor behavior and some funds, like hedge funds, have returns distributions far from a normal distribution Keating and Shadwick (2002a, 2002b) proposed a new measure called Omega that incorporates all the moments of the distribution, and has the advantage of requiring no assumptions on the returns distribution or on the utility function of a risk averse investor. The purpose of this work is to verify if this measure has a greater forecast power than other performance measures, like Sharpe and Sortino Ratios. The empiric study indicated that Omega measure makes a ranking, most of the time, different from the other measures. Despite the portfolios constructed with Omega have had an average return greater than the average return of the portfolios constructed using the other measures, in almost all the tests, this difference of averages of returns was significant only in some cases. In spite of this, there is a light indication that Omega measure is the most appropriate for the use of investors when is made the performance evaluation of mutual funds.
A avaliação de desempenho de fundos de investimentos é, tradicionalmente, realizada utilizando-se o Índice de Sharpe, que leva em consideração apenas os dois primeiros momentos da distribuição de retornos (média e variância), assumindo as premissas de normalidade da distribuição de retornos e função quadrática de utilidade do investidor. Entretanto, é sabido que uma função de utilidade quadrática é inconsistente com o comportamento do investidor e que as distribuições de retornos de determinados fundos, como os hedge funds, estão longe de serem uma distribuição normal. Keating e Shadwick (2002a, 2002b) introduziram uma nova medida denominada Ômega que incorpora todos os momentos da distribuição, e tem a vantagem de não ser necessário fazer premissas sobre a distribuição dos retornos nem da função de utilidade de um investidor avesso ao risco. O objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se esta medida Ômega tem um poder de previsibilidade maior que outras medidas de avaliação de desempenho, como o Índice de Sharpe e o Índice de Sortino. O estudo empírico indicou que a medida Ômega gera um ranqueamento, na maioria das vezes, relativamente diferente das outras medidas testadas. Apesar das carteiras formadas com base na medida Ômega terem gerado um retorno médio maior que o retorno médio das carteiras formadas pelas outras medidas em praticamente todos os testes, esta diferença entre as médias dos retornos só foi significativa em alguns casos. Mesmo assim, há uma leve indicação de que a medida Ômega é a mais apropriada para utilização do investidor ao fazer a avaliação de desempenho dos fundos de investimentos.

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This study aims to analyze the influence of performance measure in the rankings of multimarket funds in Brazil. The specific objectives sought to understand the concepts and application of the parameters in the evaluation of investment funds performance, present the similarities and differences of performance measures of investment funds, verify the performance of mutual funds in the period of 6 years and applying the Spearman correlation coefficient to describe and measure the relationship between the rankings produced by different levels of performance. The main contribution of this work is to identify if the indicators create different rankings for the individual or corporate investor can decide how to evaluate these funds. It attempted to separate 385 multimarket investment funds which are not exclusive with returns that represent a normal distribution (309 funds) and non-normal distribution (76 funds), in the period of January 2008 to December 2013 to analyze the correlation of rankings between the indexes. The relevance of correlation between the performance measures is if these indexes impact directly in the rankings of multimarket investment funds. Existing high rank correlations, it s clear that it s up to the investor to decide which index to use evaluating the multimarket funds. In the period analyzed, there was a high correlation between the rates of Modigliani, Sharpe and Sortino. The Treynor index was the only one where it was found a low correlation with the others
O presente trabalho tem como principal objetivo analisar a influ??ncia dos ??ndices de desempenho nos rankings dos fundos multimercado no Brasil. Como objetivos espec??ficos, buscou-se compreender os conceitos e aplica????o dos ??ndices na avalia????o de desempenho de fundos de investimento, apresentar as semelhan??as e diferen??as dos ??ndices de desempenho de fundos de investimento, verificar o desempenho dos fundos de investimento no per??odo de 6 anos e aplicar o ??ndice de correla????o de Spearman para descrever e mensurar a rela????o entre os rankings produzidos por diferentes ??ndices de desempenho. A principal contribui????o desse trabalho ?? identificar se os indicadores de desempenho produzem rankings diferentes para que o investidor individual ou corporativo possa decidir como avaliar esses fundos. Buscou-se separar 385 fundos de investimento multimercado n??o exclusivos com retornos mensais que representam uma distribui????o normal (309 fundos) e distribui????o n??o normal (76 fundos), do per??odo de Janeiro de 2008 a Dezembro de 2013 para analisar a correla????o dos rankings entre os ??ndices. A relev??ncia da correla????o entre os ??ndices ?? analisar se a escolha dessas medidas impactam diretamente nos rankings dos fundos multimercado. Existindo alta correla????o, ?? poss??vel afirmar que fica a crit??rio do investidor qual ??ndice utilizar para a avalia????o de fundos. No per??odo analisado, houve alta correla????o entre os ??ndices de Modigliani, Sharpe e Sortino. O ??ndice de Treynor foi o ??nico em que foi constatada baixa correla????o com os demais.

Les stratégies de volatilité ont connu un rapide essor suite à la crise financière de 2008. Or, les récentes performances catastrophiques de ces instruments indiciels ont remis en question leurs contributions en couverture de portefeuille. Mes travaux de thèse visent à repenser, réinventer la philosophie des stratégies de volatilité. Au travers d'une analyse empirique préliminaire reposant sur la théorie de l'utilité espérée, le chapitre 1 dresse le diagnostic des stratégies traditionnelles de volatilité basées sur la couverture de long-terme par la réplication passive de la volatilité implicite. Il montre que, bien que ce type de couverture bat la couverture traditionnelle, elle s'avère inappropriée pour des investisseurs peu averses au risque.Le chapitre 2 ouvre la voie à une nouvelle génération de stratégies de volatilité, actives, optionnelles et basées sur l'investissement factoriel. En effet, notre décomposition analytique et empirique du smile de volatilité implicite en primes de risque implicites, distinctes et investissables permet de monétiser de manière active le portage de risques d'ordres supérieurs. Ces primes de risques mesurent l'écart de valorisation entre les distributions neutres au risque et les distributions physiques.Enfin, le chapitre 3 compare notre approche investissement factoriel avec les stratégies de volatilité employées par les hedge funds. Notre essai montre que nos stratégies de primes de risque d'assurance sont des déterminants importants dans la performance des hedge funds, tant en analyse temporelle que cross-sectionnelle. Ainsi, nous mettons en évidence dans quelle mesure l'alpha provient en réalité de la vente de stratégies d'assurance contre le risque extrême
Volatility strategies have flourished since the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. Nevertheless, the recent catastrophic performance of such exchange-traded products has put into question their contributions for portfolio hedging and diversification. My thesis work aims to rethink and reinvent the philosophy of volatility strategies.From a preliminary empirical study based on the expected utility theory, Chapter 1 makes a diagnostic of traditional volatility strategies, based on buy-and-hold investments and passive replication of implied volatility. It exhibits that, although such portfolio hedging significantly outperforms traditional hedging, it appears strongly inappropriate for risk-loving investors.Chapter 2 paves the way for a new generation of volatility strategies, active, option-based and factor-based investing. Indeed, our both analytical and empirical decomposition of implied volatility smiles into a combination of implied risk premia, distinct and tradeable, enables to harvest actively the compensation for bearing higher-order risks. These insurance risk premia measure the pricing discrepanciesbetween the risk-neutral and the physical probability distributions.Finally, Chapter 3 compares our factor-based investing approach to the strategies usually employed in the hedge fund universe. Our essay clearly evidences that our tail risk premia strategies are incremental determinants in the hedge fund performance, in both the time-series and the cross-section of returns. Hence, we exhibit to what extent hedge fund alpha actually arises from selling crash insurance strategies against tail risks

The purpose of this study is to analyze Swedish hedge funds in terms of pursued investment strategies, risks and returns.

The study deals with a large number of quantitative data and delimitations were used to obtain a sample that better fulfills the purpose of this paper. The time frame chosen for increas-ing validity and reliability was almost four years. Furthermore, the study uses secondary data due to difficulties and costs as-sociated with obtaining primary data though this is not consi-dered as lowering the quality of the study.

The theory section starts by presenting the differences between hedge funds and mutual funds and then focusing on different hedge fund strategies, risks associated with hedge funds and fi-nally risk and return measurements. This section provides an overview for the empirical findings and analysis.

In the empirical findings and analysis, statistical calculations of and Analysis the risk measurements standard deviation, Sharpe ratio, track-ing error and correlation are conducted for the sample. The re-sults are related to the hedge funds strategies. Later on the strategies are weighted against each other. Finally, all strategies are compared to OMXS to find the investors‟ most appropriate investment structure.

After categorizing the different hedge funds with respect to pursued strategies, the result shows how there are clear dispari-ties in risk and returns for the different strategies. We found indications of a significant relationship between high return and high risk as well as between low return and low risk.

 

This dissertation aims to explore the impact of the financial crisis of 2007-08 on the equity holdings of U.S. hedge funds in terms of risk, analyzing its evolution from early 2000 until late 2015. I register the expected positive reaction of the equity portfolio risk of the U.S. hedge funds to the crisis. This is in part fueled by both the acquisition of risky stocks and the sale of safer ones. From the Fama-MacBeth regression I obtain several relations with respect to the equity portfolio volatility, in particular, that investing relatively more in growth stocks, diversifying more your portfolio, and having a relatively higher equity portfolio valuation lead, individually, to a reduction on risk, on average. On the other hand, investing relatively more in small cap stocks, most likely, increases volatility, on average. Finally, hedge funds that invest more in stocks with relatively lower capital expenditures are expected to score a higher level of volatility, on average, however, this relation reverses as the crisis hits and remains that way in the post-crisis period.
This dissertation aims to explore the impact of the financial crisis of 2007-08 on the equity holdings of U.S. hedge funds in terms of risk, analyzing its evolution from early 2000 until late 2015. I register the expected positive reaction of the equity portfolio risk of the U.S. hedge funds to the crisis. This is in part fueled by both the acquisition of risky stocks and the sale of safer ones. From the Fama-MacBeth regression I obtain several relations with respect to the equity portfolio volatility, in particular, that investing relatively more in growth stocks, diversifying more your portfolio, and having a relatively higher equity portfolio valuation lead, individually, to a reduction on risk, on average. On the other hand, investing relatively more in small cap stocks, most likely, increases volatility, on average. Finally, hedge funds that invest more in stocks with relatively lower capital expenditures are expected to score a higher level of volatility, on average, however, this relation reverses as the crisis hits and remains that way in the post-crisis period.

The inability of traditional models to account for time-varying estimates has led to conditional models being adopted for performance evaluation. In this dissertation I use the conditional models of Ferson and Schadt [1996] and Christopherson, Ferson and Glassman [1998] and the CISDM Alternative Investments Database to evaluate the performance of hedge funds and managed futures. One of the advantages of the CISDM alternative investment database is its defunct funds component. I use both components to construct a dataset that is free of survivorship bias. I focus on four major issues related to the CISDM alternative investment database and hedge funds and managed futures. The first issue relates to the characteristics of the defunct funds component. It is well known that it consists of funds that have stopped reporting for reasons other than going out of business, although poor performance is the primary reason for disappearance. The CISDM database reports the reasons due to which funds stop reporting. I checked my quantitative results against this information and found consistency in most cases. The second issue I focus on is performance evaluation and market timing. I find that while portfolios of active funds exhibit significantly positive alphas, most dead fund portfolios do not. I also investigate the market timing ability of these portfolios. My results validate that hedge funds pursue short-volatility strategies. The third issue relates to the performance of managed futures. I use the models of Ferson and Schadt [1996] to estimate excess return alphas for 78 CTAs that had complete data for the period 1993–2003. I find that the MFSB indices that were used as proxies for the market were remarkably effective in evaluating performance of managed futures. Finally I examine out-of-sample performance. I evaluate the performance of hedge fund portfolios constructed by ranking commonly used risk measures. I find that in most cases performance of ranked portfolios vary considerable and conclude that investors should exercise caution when constructing portfolios based on the measures. I also conclude that standard deviation is remarkably consistent over time compared to other measures.

碩士
國立中央大學
財務金融學系碩士在職專班
94
For common investors, a reasonable return would be their main concerns. That is, the evaluation of the fund performance would rely on the rate of return. However, the rate of return often highly relates to the degree of risks. Accordingly, when one uses the rate of return to assess the fund performance, the risks that investors may assume should be considered for a justifiable comparing basis. The major difference between hedge funds and mutual funds would be that: the former pursues absolute return while the latter seeks relative return. This implies that hedge funds seek to yield a positive return to investors. Mutual funds, with the rate of return might be negative,aim at beating the market . In this study, a hedge fund of funds exchange platform in Hong Kong was taken as the sample. Taiwan Stocks weighted price index and MSCI World Index are chosee as the market portfolio. Three indicators: Sharpe ratio, Jensen’s Alpha index and Treynro ratio are chosee to analyze the fund performance of the target hedge fund when it is compared with the portfolio performance. The empirical finding, most importantly, indicates that the fund performance of the hedge fund depends on the fund managers’ professional expertise and experiences rather on operating strategies ascribed to the hedge fund.

JEL Classification: G11, G19
Combining the Mean Variance Utility function with the overall metrics that evaluate portfolios’ performance, this project aims to study the correlations of equal weighted portfolios based on the top 10 hedge funds of the studied sample, that maximize the expected utility of an investor and the performance measures; and to understand the overall results of the correlations between those portfolios. Hedge funds are instruments that can represent different strategies, and in order to have an approximation to the different risk profiles, the correlations between the final ranks based on the different risk aversion coefficients in the Mean Variance Utility Function were studied. Constructing equal weighted portfolios with the top ten hedge funds that maximize the different levels of risk aversion, as well as the different performance metrics, the correlation between those portfolios will provide the final conclusion of the project. These correlations proved that, since there are different types of investors that have different preferences, the process of evaluation of the portfolios cannot have the same methodology. Preferences should be taken in consideration, and there are metrics that are more correlated to the objectives of the final investor, than others.
Ao agrupar a função de utilidade média e variância com as mais conhecidas métricas que são utilizadas na avaliação de performance de portefólios, este projeto tem como objetivo estudar as correlações entre os portefólios, que maximizam as equações de utilidade média e variância, e os que maximizam as métricas de performance, tentado assim possibilitar uma conclusão sobre quais métricas que deverão ser utilizadas, ou que melhor representam as preferências de investidores com variados perfis de risco. Os hedge funds são instrumentos que representam diferentes estratégias, e de forma a aproximar os diferentes perfis de risco, as correlações dos rankings que têm por base a maximização dos diferentes patamares de aversão ao risco na função de Média e Variância, foram estudadas. Ao construir portefólios com base nos primeiros dez hedge funds, ponderados igualmente, que maximização as diferentes equações de Média Variância, traduzindo os diferentes perfis de risco, bem como os portefólios que maximizam as diferentes métricas que são utilizadas na avaliação de performance, o estudo das correlações destes portefólios irá proporcionar a conclusão final do projeto. Estas correlações provam que, visto que existem diferentes tipos de investidores com diferentes preferências e objetivos, o processo de avaliação das diferentes performances não pode ter as mesmas metodologias. Estas preferências devem ser tidas em consideração, visto que existem métricas que são mais correlacionadas, do que outras, com os objetivos dos diferentes investidores.

Performance measurement is an integral part of investment analysis and risk management. Investment performance comprises two primary elements, namely; risk and return. The measurement of return is more straightforward compared with the measurement of risk: the latter is stochastic and thus requires more complex computation. Risk and return should, however, not be considered in isolation by investors as these elements are interlinked according to modern portfolio theory (MPT). The assembly of risk and return into a risk-adjusted number is an essential responsibility of performance measurement as it is meaningless to compare funds with dissimilar expected returns and risks by focusing solely on total return values. Since the advent of MPT performance evaluation has been conducted within the risk-return or mean-variance framework. Traditional, liner performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, do, however, have their drawbacks despite their widespread use and copious interpretations. The first problem explores the characterisation of hedge fund returns which lead to standard methods of assessing the risks and rewards of these funds being misleading and inappropriate. Volatility measures such as the Sharpe ratio, which are based on mean-variance theory, are generally unsuitable for dealing with asymmetric return distributions. The distribution of hedge fund returns deviates significantly from normality consequentially rendering volatility measures ill-suited for hedge fund returns due to not incorporating higher order moments of the returns distribution. Investors, nevertheless, rely on traditional performance measures to evaluate the risk-adjusted performance of (these) investments. Also, these traditional risk-adjusted performance measures were developed specifically for traditional investments (i.e. non-dynamic and or linear investments). Hedge funds also embrace a variety of strategies, styles and securities, all of which emphasises the necessity for risk management measures and techniques designed specifically for these dynamic funds. The second problem recognises that traditional risk-adjusted performance measures are not complete as they do not implicitly include or measure all components of risk. These traditional performance measures can therefore be considered one dimensional as each measure includes only a particular component or type of risk and leaves other risk components or dimensions untouched. Dynamic, sophisticated investments – such as those pursued by hedge funds – are often characterised by multi-risk dimensionality. The different risk types to which hedge funds are exposed substantiates the fact that volatility does not capture all inherent hedge fund risk factors. Also, no single existing measure captures the entire spectrum of risks. Therefore, traditional risk measurement methods must be modified, or performance measures that consider the components (factors) of risk left untouched (unconsidered) by the traditional performance measures should be considered alongside traditional performance appraisal measures. Moreover, the 2007-9 global financial crisis also set off an essential debate of whether risks are being measured appropriately and, in-turn, the re-evaluation of risk analysis methods and techniques. The need to continuously augment existing and devise new techniques to measure financial risk are paramount given the continuous development and ever-increasing sophistication of financial markets and the hedge fund industry. This thesis explores the named problems facing modern financial risk management in a hedge fund portfolio context through three objectives. The aim of this thesis is to critically evaluate whether the novel performance measures included provide investors with additional information, to traditional performance measures, when making hedge fund investment decisions. The Sharpe ratio is taken as the primary representative of traditional performance measures given its widespread use and also for being the hedge fund industry’s performance metric of choice. The objectives have been accomplished through the modification, altered use or alternative application of existing risk assessment techniques and through the development of new techniques, when traditional or older techniques proved to be inadequate.
PhD (Risk Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014