Hedge Fund Diversification: How Much is Enough?
FAME Research Working Paper No. 52
53 Pages Posted: 31 Aug 2002
Date Written: July 2002
Abstract
There are many benefits to investing in hedge funds, particularly when using a diversified multi-strategy approach. Over the recent years, multi-strategy funds of hedge funds have flourished and are now the favorite investment vehicles of institutional investors to discover the world of alternative investments. More recently, funds of hedge funds that specialize within an investment style have also emerged. Both types of funds put forward their ability to diversify risks by spreading them over several managers. However, diversifying a hedge fund portfolio also raises a number of issues, such as the optimal number of hedge funds to really benefit from diversification, and the influence of diversification on the various statistics of the return distribution (e.g. expected return, skewness, kurtosis, correlation with traditional asset classes, value at risk and other tail statistics). In this paper, using a large database of hedge funds over the 1990-2001 period, we study the impact of diversification on naively constructed (randomly chosen and equally weighted) hedge fund portfolios. We also provide some insight into style diversification benefits, as well as the inter-temporal evolution of diversification effects on hedge funds.
Keywords: Hedge funds, diversification
JEL Classification: G11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival and Performance 1989-1995
By Stephen J. Brown, William N. Goetzmann, ...
-
Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival and Performance 1989-1995
By Stephen J. Brown, William N. Goetzmann, ...
-
Characteristics of Risk and Return in Risk Arbitrage
By Mark L. Mitchell and Todd C. Pulvino
-
Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival & Performance 1989-1995
By William N. Goetzmann, Roger G. Ibbotson, ...
-
Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival & Performance 1989-1995
By Stephen J. Brown, William N. Goetzmann, ...
-
An Econometric Model of Serial Correlation and Illiquidity in Hedge Fund Returns
By Mila Getmansky Sherman, Andrew W. Lo, ...
-
An Econometric Model of Serial Correlation and Illiquidity in Hedge Fund Returns
By Mila Getmansky Sherman, Andrew W. Lo, ...
-
Hedge Funds: The Living and the Dead
By Bing Liang
-
Flows, Performance, and Managerial Incentives in Hedge Funds
By Vikas Agarwal, Naveen D. Daniel, ...