Hedge Fund Pricing

The two main differentiating features of hedge fund managers compared to traditional investment managers are their ability to leverage and to take both short and long positions. Asset-pricing models used in traditional investment management appraisal have evolved to take these two features into account to correctly specify the pricing of hedge funds. Modern hedge fund asset-pricing theory has its roots in two venerable fields of financial economics research: capital asset pricing and the theory of the firm. This chapter presents the theory and intuition behind the most widely used models for hedge fund performance analysis. MATLAB is used as a computational platform for examples in the chapter using 10 hypothetical hedge fund return vectors. Quants and managers of funds of hedge funds deal mostly with data as presented in net monthly column vectors typically in a Microsoft Excel format.