We Consider Four Utility Functions, Each Of Which Incorporates A Benchmark To Better Capture The Motivations Of Today's Portfolio Managers. Assuming Instrument Returns Are Normally Distributed, We Establish Conditions Under Which Optimal Portfolios For These Utilities Are Mean-Variance Efficient...

Hedge funds typically have non-normal return distributions marked by significant positive or negative skewness and high kurtosis. Mean-variance optimization models ignore these higher moments of the return distribution. If a mean-variance optimization model suggests significant allocation to...

Hedge funds typically have non-normal return distributions marked by significant positive or negative skewness and high kurtosis. Mean-variance optimization models ignore these higher moments of the return distribution, and thus fail to convince investors who care about the unwanted skewness and...

We consider portfolio allocation in which the underlying investment instruments are hedge funds. Benchmarks and conditional-value-at-risk motivate a family of utility functions involving the probability of outperforming a benchmark and expected shortfall from another benchmark. Non-normal return...

We prove that the total risk of a portfolio held by an investor with preferences described by a power utility with subsistence or a HARA utility, is a weighted sum of the covariances between the portfolio's return and higher-order powers of that return, shifted by the subsistence level. We show...