IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rasset/v2y2012i1p89-110..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Diversification in Funds of Hedge Funds: Is It Possible to Overdiversify?

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen J. Brown
  • Greg N. Gregoriou
  • Razvan Pascalau

Abstract

Many institutions are attracted to diversified portfolios of hedge funds, referred to as Funds of Hedge Funds (FoHFs). In this article, we examine a new database that separates out for the first time the effects of diversification (the number of underlying hedge funds) from scale (the magnitude of assets under management). We find with others that the variance-reducing effects of diversification diminish once FoHFs hold more than 20 underlying hedge funds. This excess diversification actually increases their left-tail risk exposure once we account for return smoothing. Furthermore, the average FoHF in our sample is more exposed to left-tail risk than are naïve $1/N$ randomly chosen portfolios. This increase in tail risk is accompanied by lower returns, which we attribute to the cost of necessary due diligence that increases with the number of hedge funds.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen J. Brown & Greg N. Gregoriou & Razvan Pascalau, 2012. "Diversification in Funds of Hedge Funds: Is It Possible to Overdiversify?," The Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 2(1), pages 89-110.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:rasset:v:2:y:2012:i:1:p:89-110.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rapstu/rar003
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Racicot, François-Éric & Théoret, Raymond, 2019. "Hedge fund return higher moments over the business cycle," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 73-97.
    2. Racicot, François-Éric & Théoret, Raymond, 2018. "Multi-moment risk, hedging strategies, & the business cycle," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 637-675.
    3. Cui, Wei & Yao, Juan, 2020. "Funds of hedge funds: Are they really the high society for little guys?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 346-361.
    4. Agarwal, Vikas & Green, Tracy Clifton & Ren, Honglin, 2017. "Alpha or beta in the eye of the beholder: What drives hedge fund flows?," CFR Working Papers 15-08, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR), revised 2017.
    5. Agarwal, Vikas & Green, T. Clifton & Ren, Honglin, 2018. "Alpha or beta in the eye of the beholder: What drives hedge fund flows?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(3), pages 417-434.
    6. Gregoriou, Greg N. & Racicot, François-Éric & Théoret, Raymond, 2021. "The response of hedge fund tail risk to macroeconomic shocks: A nonlinear VAR approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 843-872.
    7. Turan G. Bali & Stephen J. Brown & K. Ozgur Demirtas, 2013. "Do Hedge Funds Outperform Stocks and Bonds?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(8), pages 1887-1903, August.
    8. Dorfleitner, Gregor & Fischer, Lukas & Lung, Carina & Willmertinger, Philipp & Stang, Nico & Dietrich, Natalie, 2018. "To follow or not to follow – An empirical analysis of the returns of actors on social trading platforms," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 160-171.
    9. Monica Billio & Lorenzo Frattarolo & Loriana Pelizzon, 2016. "Hedge Fund Tail Risk: An investigation in stressed markets, extended version with appendix," Working Papers 2016:01, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    10. Hwang, Inchang & Xu, Simon & In, Francis & Kim, Tong Suk, 2017. "Systemic risk and cross-sectional hedge fund returns," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 109-130.
    11. François-Éric Racicot & Raymond Théoret, 2016. "The q-factor model and the redundancy of the value factor: An application to hedge funds," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 17(7), pages 526-539, December.
    12. Agarwal, Vikas & Ruenzi, Stefan & Weigert, Florian, 2017. "Tail risk in hedge funds: A unique view from portfolio holdings," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(3), pages 610-636.
    13. Lee, Jennifer Eunkyeong & Cho, Hoon & Ryu, Doojin & Seok, Sangik, 2023. "Does performance-chasing behavior matter? International evidence," Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    14. Bali, Turan G. & Brown, Stephen J. & Caglayan, Mustafa O., 2014. "Macroeconomic risk and hedge fund returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(1), pages 1-19.
    15. Papageorgiou, Nicolas & Reeves, Jonathan J. & Xie, Xuan, 2016. "Betas and the myth of market neutrality," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 548-558.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rasset:v:2:y:2012:i:1:p:89-110.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/raps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.