All Style Hedge Fund Analysis with Constant- and Time-Varying Factor Loading Models

Abstract

Driven by vast historical growth and the recent crises, the hedge fund industry has undergone several changes. This thesis presents studies on the analysis of hedge fund returns within changing market states by applying different constant, asymmetric and time-varying factor loading models. Considered models include the CAPM, Fama-French 3-factor model, Carhart 4-factor model, Fama-French 5-Factor model, Agarwal-Naik 8-factor model and the Fung-Hsieh 7- and 8-factor models. In addition, and unlike previous research, 94 hedge fund strategy styles have been analysed individually to test whether the model performances differ among approaches. The first full-sample analysis exhibits generally low explanatory power whereby the more sophisticated models perform superiorly. Equity strategies, especially long-only funds, exhibit high adjusted R-Squared among all models, while fixed income, fundamental and technical hedge funds result in low significance. The CUSUM control chart based crisis/non-crisis dummy cannot substantially improve the explanatory power of the models. Hedge fund alpha and factor significance varies considerably among strategies and the power of the models remains similarly poor. Asymmetric up/down models exhibit slightly improved explanatory power while the significance of alpha diminishes. Replacing the conditional up/down variable by the crisis/non-crisis setting resulted in inferior results. Empirical analysis with asymmetric higher-moment models approves the asymmetries in hedge fund returns partially. Moreover, a time-varying approach substantially improves the explanatory power of all models while hedge fund alpha further diminishes. All dynamic models exhibit significant exposures on macro state variables for a high proportion of funds. To summarise, it has been shown how simple models can be fitted to increase the explanatory power. As a result, the adjusted R-Squared were improved by 73%. On a strategy level, equity funds are explained the best while fixed income, fundamental and technical hedge funds are the most difficult to analyse.