IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rdg/icmadp/icma-dp2005-07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Detecting Switching Strategies in Equity Hedge Funds

Author

Listed:
  • Carol Alexander

    (ICMA Centre, University of Reading)

  • Anca Dimitriu

    (ICMA Centre, University of Reading)

Abstract

Equity hedge funds are thought to effectively operate market timing by implementing switching strategies conditional on market circumstances. In this paper we use only the reported monthly returns on a set of funds to infer the type of switching strategies they follow, if any, as well as their switching times. A set of regime-switching models for each equity hedge funds' returns against various benchmarks are estimated; subsequently we answer the following general questions: What proportion of equity funds seem to have switching strategies in place? Which are the most popular instruments for switching strategies? And what is the relationship between the switching times of different funds? The general methodology applied in this paper may be useful to investors that wish to detect, from only from their reported returns, whether and when a particular fund has been timing the market.

Suggested Citation

  • Carol Alexander & Anca Dimitriu, 2005. "Detecting Switching Strategies in Equity Hedge Funds," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2005-07, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
  • Handle: RePEc:rdg:icmadp:icma-dp2005-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/pdf/discussion/DP2005-07.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Clarida, Richard H. & Sarno, Lucio & Taylor, Mark P. & Valente, Giorgio, 2003. "The out-of-sample success of term structure models as exchange rate predictors: a step beyond," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 61-83, May.
    2. Bansal, Ravi & Viswanathan, S, 1993. "No Arbitrage and Arbitrage Pricing: A New Approach," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(4), pages 1231-1262, September.
    3. Hansen, Bruce E, 1996. "Erratum: The Likelihood Ratio Test under Nonstandard Conditions: Testing the Markov Switching Model of GNP," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(2), pages 195-198, March-Apr.
    4. Massimo Guidolin & Allan Timmermann, 2008. "Size and Value Anomalies under Regime Shifts," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 6(1), pages 1-48, Winter.
    5. Mark Mitchell & Todd Pulvino, 2001. "Characteristics of Risk and Return in Risk Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2135-2175, December.
    6. Hall, Stephen G & Psaradakis, Zacharias & Sola, Martin, 1999. "Detecting Periodically Collapsing Bubbles: A Markov-Switching Unit Root Test," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 14(2), pages 143-154, March-Apr.
    7. Fung, William & Hsieh, David A, 2001. "The Risk in Hedge Fund Strategies: Theory and Evidence from Trend Followers," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(2), pages 313-341.
    8. Maheu, John M & McCurdy, Thomas H, 2000. "Identifying Bull and Bear Markets in Stock Returns," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 18(1), pages 100-112, January.
    9. Bansal, Ravi & Hsieh, David A & Viswanathan, S, 1993. "A New Approach to International Arbitrage Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(5), pages 1719-1747, December.
    10. Bruce E. Hansen, 1995. "Erratum: The Likelihood ratio Test Under Nonstandard Conditions: Testing the Markov Switching Model of GNP," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 296., Boston College Department of Economics.
    11. Amin, Gaurav S. & Kat, Harry M., 2003. "Hedge Fund Performance 1990–2000: Do the “Money Machines” Really Add Value?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(2), pages 251-274, June.
    12. Kim, Chang-Jin, 1994. "Dynamic linear models with Markov-switching," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1-2), pages 1-22.
    13. Hamilton, James D & Gang, Lin, 1996. "Stock Market Volatility and the Business Cycle," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(5), pages 573-593, Sept.-Oct.
    14. Psaradakis, Zacharias & Sola, Martin, 1998. "Finite-sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimator in autoregressive models with Markov switching," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 369-386, June.
    15. Campbell R. Harvey & Akhtar Siddique, 2000. "Conditional Skewness in Asset Pricing Tests," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(3), pages 1263-1295, June.
    16. Hamilton, James D, 1989. "A New Approach to the Economic Analysis of Nonstationary Time Series and the Business Cycle," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(2), pages 357-384, March.
    17. Carol Alexander & Anca Dimitriu, 2005. "Indexing, cointegration and equity market regimes," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(3), pages 213-231.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Anastasios G. Malliaris & Ramaprasad Bhar, 2011. "Dividends, Momentum, and Macroeconomic Variables as Determinants of the US Equity Premium Across Economic Regimes," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 3(1), pages 27-53, April.
    2. Giamouridis, Daniel & Vrontos, Ioannis D., 2007. "Hedge fund portfolio construction: A comparison of static and dynamic approaches," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 199-217, January.
    3. Johannes Hauptmann & Anja Hoppenkamps & Aleksey Min & Franz Ramsauer & Rudi Zagst, 2014. "Forecasting market turbulence using regime-switching models," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 28(2), pages 139-164, May.
    4. Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Bhar, Ramaprasad & Thompson, Mark A., 2010. "Re-examining the dynamic causal oil-macroeconomy relationship," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 298-305, September.
    5. Celso Brunetti & Jeffrey H. Harris & Bahattin Büyükşahin, 2024. "Crude Oil Price Movements and Institutional Traders," Commodities, MDPI, vol. 3(1), pages 1-23, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Carol Alexander & Anca Dimitriu, 2003. "Equity Indexing: Conitegration and Stock Price Dispersion: A Regime Switiching Approach to market Efficiency," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2003-02, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    2. Shiu‐Sheng Chen, 2007. "Does Monetary Policy Have Asymmetric Effects on Stock Returns?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(2‐3), pages 667-688, March.
    3. Billio, Monica & Getmansky, Mila & Pelizzon, Loriana, 2012. "Dynamic risk exposures in hedge funds," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(11), pages 3517-3532.
    4. Chevallier, Julien, 2011. "Evaluating the carbon-macroeconomy relationship: Evidence from threshold vector error-correction and Markov-switching VAR models," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 2634-2656.
    5. Perez-Quiros, Gabriel & Timmermann, Allan, 2001. "Business cycle asymmetries in stock returns: Evidence from higher order moments and conditional densities," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 103(1-2), pages 259-306, July.
    6. Kasahara, Hiroyuki & Shimotsu, Katsumi, 2019. "Asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator in regime switching econometric models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 208(2), pages 442-467.
    7. Kim, Chang-Jin & Morley, James C. & Nelson, Charles R., 2001. "Does an intertemporal tradeoff between risk and return explain mean reversion in stock prices?," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 403-426, September.
    8. Seuk Wai Phoong & Seuk Yen Phoong & Shi Ling Khek, 2022. "Systematic Literature Review With Bibliometric Analysis on Markov Switching Model: Methods and Applications," SAGE Open, , vol. 12(2), pages 21582440221, April.
    9. Hans-Martin Krolzig, 2001. "Markov-Switching Procedures for Dating the Euro-Zone Business Cycle," Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung / Quarterly Journal of Economic Research, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 70(3), pages 339-351.
    10. Carol Alexander & Andreas Kaeck, 2006. "Regimes in CDS Spreads: A Markov Switching Model of iTraxx Europe Indices," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2006-08, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    11. Massimo Guidolin, 2011. "Markov Switching Models in Empirical Finance," Advances in Econometrics, in: Missing Data Methods: Time-Series Methods and Applications, pages 1-86, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    12. Smith, Aaron & Naik, Prasad A. & Tsai, Chih-Ling, 2006. "Markov-switching model selection using Kullback-Leibler divergence," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 134(2), pages 553-577, October.
    13. Massimo Guidolin & Federica Ria, 2011. "Regime shifts in mean-variance efficient frontiers: Some international evidence," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 12(5), pages 322-349, November.
    14. Haase, Felix & Neuenkirch, Matthias, 2023. "Predictability of bull and bear markets: A new look at forecasting stock market regimes (and returns) in the US," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 587-605.
    15. Andrew J. Patton, 2009. "Are "Market Neutral" Hedge Funds Really Market Neutral?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(7), pages 2295-2330, July.
    16. Alexander, Carol & Kaeck, Andreas, 2008. "Regime dependent determinants of credit default swap spreads," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1008-1021, June.
    17. Taamouti, Abderrahim, 2012. "Moments of multivariate regime switching with application to risk-return trade-off," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 292-308.
    18. Chung-Ming Kuan, 2013. "Markov switching model (in Russian)," Quantile, Quantile, issue 11, pages 13-40, December.
    19. Roland G. Shami & Catherine S. Forbes, 2002. "Non-linear Modelling of the Australian Business Cycle using a Leading Indicator," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 5/02, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    20. Shami, R.G. & Forbes, C.S., 2000. "A structural Time Series Model with Markov Switching," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 10/00, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.

    More about this item

    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:rdg:icmadp:icma-dp2005-07. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Marie Pearson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bsrdguk.html .

    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.