On the Market Timing of Hedge Fund Managers

Abstract

In this article, the authors evaluate whether directional hedge fund managers benefit from market timing in investment strategies. Analysis of a sample of current and defunct onshore and offshore funds does not reveal any significant market-timing alpha. Most hedge fund managers exhibit good security selection skill, which tends to be negatively correlated with market-timing ability, but not correlated with asset size or age of the fund. Tests of single- and multi-index models are consistent with published findings in the mutual fund literature that the hedge fund returns exhibit low correlation with market index returns.