1.1 What Are Hedge Funds?

1.2 The History and the Future

1.3 Academic Perspective

1.4 The Aim of the Book

1.1 What Are Hedge Funds?

It is not an easy task to come up with a precise and succinct definition for the term “hedge fund.” The hedge fund world is an ever-changing one, and this is a major reason why there is no exact and universally accepted legal definition for hedge funds. One can say that they are private pools of capital in the sense that ownership claims in a hedge fund are not traded in organized exchanges, and fund investors benefit from appreciations in the market value of a hedge fund’s asset portfolio. It is well known that hedge funds present investment opportunities which provide risk and return combinations that are different from traditional equity and fixed income investments. Other than these, hedge funds vary significantly among themselves in terms of investment strategy, risk, and return characteristics. Some hedge funds are large, and others are small, measured by the assets they have under management. Some hedge funds are on the way to becoming household names, whereas others choose to operate discretely. Technological innovations have revolutionized the hedge fund industry and contributed to the heterogeneity that had been already inherent in the business. What cannot be denied is that hedge funds now constitute an alternative financial system by themselves. They act as the primary liquidity providers for relatively more obscure assets such as distressed debt, replace traditional financial intermediaries as lenders to speculative grade corporations, and function as insurers of last resort for risks that used to be hard to manage. Also, hedge funds have become the primary investors in listed companies raising equity privately. Brophy et al. (2009) report that companies financed by hedge funds are generally poorly performing firms with substantial information asymmetries. Companies that raise capital from hedge funds underperform companies that raise capital from other sources, implying that hedge funds act as equity providers for firms that cannot otherwise access equity financing.

Although there is a lot of heterogeneity in the hedge fund industry, it is possible to list some common traits that most hedge funds share. One of these traits is the flexibility that hedge funds enjoy. Indeed, this flexibility is the main factor that differentiates hedge funds from more traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds. The performance of mutual funds is measured with respect to a benchmark, and any deviation from the benchmark is considered as risk. So, for the traditional asset management industry, risk is assessed on a relative basis. When market benchmarks are plunging in value, it is natural to expect that mutual fund returns will also go down with these benchmarks. This is not valid for hedge funds since hedge funds claim to focus on absolute returns, and, consequently, risk is also assessed in an absolute sense. What hedge funds care about is not the direction in which the overall market is moving, but the ability to spot relative price discrepancies between multiple securities and exploit these opportunities.

Hedge funds can achieve this absolute return focus thanks to their expanded toolbox compared to that of mutual funds. Hedge funds do not face regulatory restrictions regarding the financial instruments they are allowed to trade or their portfolio compositions. Unlike traditional investment vehicles, hedge funds can use derivative instruments such as options and futures, and they are able to bet on price declines by short selling securities. Chen (2011) reports that 71% of hedge funds trade derivatives, and derivatives users exhibit lower fund risks and are less likely to liquidate under poor market conditions. Although the practice of short selling has often been criticized by regulators and corporate executives who face public and investor pressure when firm values decline, short selling is instrumental for helping asset prices to revert back to their fundamental values for overvalued securities, and hence it enhances allocational efficiency in the economy. Moreover, short selling is not a costless strategy and should be used very carefully by hedge funds when they take short exposure. The risks associated with short selling will be discussed in Chapter 2 when we describe hedge fund strategies that focus on this practice. When used with caution, short selling may help hedge funds maintain an absolute return focus and generate positive returns independent of the direction of the movements in the general markets.

Another dimension of flexibility enjoyed by hedge funds is their ability to borrow money to magnify their returns. This practice is called “leverage.” The notion of leverage is a double-edged sword and increases the risks faced by hedge funds since leverage magnifies not only gains, but also potential losses. For example, if the fund portfolio is constructed by borrowing 90% of total asset value, the portfolio could become worthless after just a 10% drop in the markets. Finally, hedge funds have fewer obligations compared to mutual funds regarding their capital adequacies. All this flexibility has its benefits and costs. It is true that hedge funds can adapt to market conditions easily compared to other investment vehicles; however, they are also subject to more manager risk since a hedge fund manager has a lot of discretion over how the fund is run.

Another common feature of hedge funds is that the regulatory and tax framework surrounding them is not stringent. Many hedge funds are registered in offshore tax havens around the world, and there is not much transparency regarding their operations. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) passed an act in December 2004 that requires certain hedge funds to register with the SEC; however, this act was struck down by the Federal Courts in June 2006. Brown et al. (2008) investigate the hedge fund disclosures beginning with the first filing date in February 2006 and find that these disclosures contained useful information regarding the funds’ operational risks. This information is undoubtedly important for hedge fund investors. However, for hedge funds, transparency is an undesired attribute because funds that take strategic positions or short sell particular securities would not want their trades to be known by outsiders. Supporting this hypothesis, after new disclosure rules were passed in 2010, Agarwal et al. (2013) focused on the holdings of hedge funds that were requested to be confidential and found that these confidential holdings were associated with more information-sensitive stocks and produced higher abnormal returns compared to the nonconfidential holdings. On the other hand, fraud risk becomes substantial in a lightly regulated industry since investors are unable to monitor the hedge funds using conventional methods, and they do not even know in which type of assets their money is invested in. The lack of transparency has enabled some hedge fund managers to cook their numbers and lie to the public about their performance. Even if the investors are suspicious about fraud, they cannot just take their money and leave the crime scene due to restrictions for redeeming capital in the hedge fund business.

This brings us to the issue of illiquidity. Hedge funds are not liquid investments. To start with, even the wealthiest institutions and individuals need to wait for specific dates or time windows before they can subscribe to hedge funds, since most funds do not let investors in on an ongoing basis. More importantly, investors cannot redeem their invested capital from the hedge funds whenever they desire. There are lock-up periods which correspond to minimum amounts of time that an investor is required to keep his or her money invested in a hedge fund before the investor is allowed to withdraw capital. These lock-up periods are especially pronounced at the initial phase of a hedge fund and may prohibit investors from redeeming their money for up to a few years. Even when the investors are allowed to redeem their money, there are certain conditions that need to be satisfied. Redemption periods are often set at the end of fiscal quarters, but they can even be less frequent. Moreover, an advance notice up to three months should be given to the hedge fund before the redemption. Funds may also have special provisions called gates that limit the amount of capital that can be withdrawn at each redemption period, or funds may charge extra fees for redemptions. These fees often decrease in amount as the capital is kept in the fund for a longer period to incentivize investors not to withdraw their money.

The rationale behind the illiquidity of hedge fund investments is that these provisions enable hedge fund managers to invest freely in illiquid assets. Illiquid assets may turn out to be very profitable investments, but they may require a long-horizon focus because it may take time before the profits can be realized. Many valuable investment opportunities in financial markets are not compatible with the idea that hedge funds should maintain continuous liquidity for their clients. In a liquid world, hedge funds would have had to maintain cash reserves as liquidity buffers, and since cash generally earns lower expected returns compared to riskier investments, this would hurt a hedge fund’s overall performance. Another drawback of liquidity is related to the adverse impact of early withdrawers on existing fund investors because potential asset sales could spur additional...