Examination Of The Fees And Performance Structure Of Equity Market Neutral Hedge Funds

This article aims at testing empirically the major building blocks that affect the performance of equity market neutral hedge funds: incentive fees, management fees, size, age, hurdle rate, high watermark provision and lockup period. A market neutral strategy combines both long and short positions. The net exposure is equal to zero. The purpose of using such strategy is to eliminate the market risk. The hedge fund manager is trying to increase the positive return by opening a long position in a bull market and short positions in a bear market. The purpose is to hedge and decrease market volatility. The hedge fund manager is checking the correlation structure of different segment or industries and accordingly aligns his/her investment strategy to buy or sell the different shares according to the sector, industry and market capitalization. It aims to provide a stable and consistent return profile that has no correlation to either equity or bond market movements, and to produce a consistent return. The fund manager has equally the same long and short positions, so the net exposure is zero. Stock index arbitrage funds trade on the spread between index futures contracts and the underlying equities. Convertible bond arbitrage funds typically capitalize on the embedded option in these bonds by purchasing them and shorting the equities. Fixed income arbitrage is based on the convergence of prices of bonds from the same issuer but with different maturities over time. The sample is provided from Data Feeder dataset. It is very comprehensive and includes equity market neutral hedge funds for the period 1998 to 2003. There are other factors that could contribute to performance persistence such as lock-up periods, hurdle rate and high water mark. We are going to use a probit binary regression equation to test the factors that create performance persistence.