Is “cherry picking” a factor in hedge fund performance?

Challenging times for hedge funds

Recently attention has been drawn to the fact that the advantage enjoyed by hedge funds over more conventional investment vehicles has been eroding. For example, the annualized “excess return” of the HFRI equity hedge fund index (adjusted for certain factors, 60 month rolling average) has declined from approximately 15% in 2000 to less than 2% in 2010, and actually has been negative over the past two years. In particular, the average year-to-date hedge fund return (as of September 2014) is only 2%, compared to the 7.27% rise in the S&P500 index. Similarly, only 23% of

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