Hedge Fund Investing: A Practical Approach to Understanding Investor Motivation, Manager Profits, and Fund Performance

Summary and Outlook

This chapter was intended to provide a foundation to facilitate a basic understanding of the nature of long and short equity strategies, their investment process, and how they calculate and report their performance and risk. It was designed to familiarize students with the core concepts, similarities, and differences between strategies.

The long and short equity style offers investors a relatively wide range of choices. Strategies can vary from the more traditional-looking long bias strategies to the more conservative and stable quantitative equity market neutral or the more opportunistic and more volatile risk arbitrage and event strategies, or something in between. Adding long and short equity strategies to a traditional portfolio or reallocating from long only to long and short equity strategies can have a positive impact on portfolios, lower volatility, and increase risk-adjusted performance.

Equity long and short managers face a number of challenges today. They invest in volatile markets, have exposure to counterpart and operational risk, need more stable sources of financing, and have produced lower returns than in the past with higher volatility. Institutional flows are continuing but at a slower than historical pace. Funds that are subscale also face business risk and additional challenges beyond managing their portfolio.