Search Results
Journal Article
Preface: hedge funds: creators of risk?
Working Paper
Credit Supply and Hedge Fund Performance: Evidence from Prime Broker Surveys
Constraints on the supply of credit by prime brokers affect hedge funds' leverage and performance. Using dealer surveys and hedge fund regulatory filings, we identify individual funds' credit supply from the availability of credit under agreements currently in place between a hedge fund and its prime brokers. We find that hedge funds connected to prime brokers that make more credit available to their hedge fund clients increase their borrowing and generate higher returns and alphas. These effects are more pronounced among hedge funds that rely on a small number of prime brokers, and those ...
Working Paper
Hedge Fund Treasury Trading and Funding Fragility: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis
Hedge fund gross U.S. Treasury (UST) exposures doubled from 2018 to February 2020 to $2.4 trillion, primarily driven by relative value arbitrage trading and supported by corresponding increases in repo borrowing. In March 2020, amid unprecedented UST market turmoil, the average UST trading hedge fund had a return of -7% and reduced its UST exposure by close to 20%, despite relatively unchanged bilateral repo volumes and haircuts. Analyzing hedge fund-creditor borrowing data, we find the large, more regulated dealers provided disproportionately more funding during the crisis than other ...
Report
Performance maximization of actively managed funds
Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund's alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance performance ratios. This paper derives the performance-maximizing strategy--a variant of buy-write--and the least upper bound on such performance enhancement, thereby showing that if common equity indexes are used as benchmarks, the potential performance enhancement from trading frequently is usually ...
Speech
Hedge funds and systemic risk
a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta?s 2006 Financial Markets Conference, Sea Island, Georgia
Working Paper
Hidden Risk
Since 2013, large U.S. hedge fund advisers have been required to report risk exposures in their regulatory filings. Using these data, we first establish that managers’ perceptions of risk contain useful information that is not embedded in fund returns. Investor flows do not respond to this information when managers perceive higher risk than what their past returns would indicate, suggesting managers strategically communicate their risk assessments with investors. During market downturns, investors withdraw capital from funds whose managers perceive higher risk, suggesting they find the ...
