On Hedge Fund Fees and Performance

I don’t think hedge funds are an optimal way to manage assets.  Here are some of my reasons:

• The fees are too high.  Why pay 2% of assets, and give up 20% of the profits?
• Hedge funds, aside from Commodity Trading Advisers and Global Macro funds, tend to be correlated, yield-seeking, and volatility-averse.  Why pay up for correlated performance?
• The statistics behind hedge fund marketing suffer from backfill bias, survivor bias, and a few other biases.

Actual returns from hedge funds trail buy-and-hold returns by a significant margin.  Investors in hedge funds are poor timers of investment.  Though past results do not indicate future returns, investors act like that.  No one will add money to a losing fund, even if that is the point where it might start to do better.

To me it seems that we are running into the limits of arbitrage.  Shorting is unnatural, and so are many derivatives.  How much do you have to pay up to get someone else to take the other side of the trade?

Only so much stock/bonds, etc., can be lent out and shorted with no additional cost.  Beyond that, shorts have to pay up, and that crimps their profits.

This is one big reason why I am happy to be a long-only value investor.  I only have to focus of businesses making money versus their current share price.  I don’t have to deal with the games surrounding shorting.  That simplifies my decision making considerably.

By David Merkel, CFA of Aleph Blog