This chapter begins with a brief history of hedge funds from the perspective of hedge fund investors—exploring the attributes that attracted private, wealthy investors to an opaque, nascent hedge fund industry during the decades leading up to new millennium. Following the chronology of several...

A diverse set of measures allows investors to evaluate hedge fund portfolio managers' performance across different dimensions. The various measures quantify the effectiveness of security selection, account for investor flows, operating risk, and worst-case investment scenarios, net out benchmark...

Despite having registered significant investor appetite in recent years, empirical research on UCITS compliant hedge funds (“Newcits” or “Alternative UCITS”) is a rare commodity. The major contribution of this paper is therefore to evaluate the performance of publicly regulated...

We show that a simple and intuitive variable, the return of a bear spread portfolio orthogonalized with respect to the market (H-Bear factor), can serve as an important pillar for explaining the cross-section of hedge fund returns. Low H-Bear exposure funds (bear risk insurance sellers)...

Hedge funds are perhaps the hottest topic in finance today, but little material of substance to date has been written on the topic. Most books focus on how to set up a hedge fund and the basic strategies, while few to none focus on what matters most: generating and understanding investment...