We explore the impact of limited attention by analyzing the performance of hedge fund managers who are distracted by marital events. We find that marriages and divorces are associated with significantly lower fund alpha, during the six-month period surrounding and the two-year period after the event. Busy managers who manage multiple funds and who are not part of a team are more affected by marital transitions. Inattentive managers place fewer active bets relative to their style peers, load more on index stocks, exhibit higher R-squareds with respect to systematic factors, and are more prone to the disposition effect.

Hedge fund teams with heterogeneous educational backgrounds, academic specializations, work experiences, genders, and races, outperform homogeneous teams after adjusting for risk and fund characteristics. An event study of manager team transitions, instrumental variable regressions, and an analysis of managers who simultaneously operate solo- and team-managed funds address endogeneity concerns. Diverse teams deliver superior returns by arbitraging more stock anomalies, avoiding behavioral biases, and minimizing downside risks. Moreover, diversity allows hedge funds to circumvent capacity constraints and generate persistent performance. Our results suggest that diversity adds value in asset management. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online

This paper introduces the concept of statistical arbitrage, a long horizon trading opportunity that generates a riskless profit and is designed to exploit persistent anomalies. Statistical arbitrage circumvents the joint hypothesis dilemma of traditional market efficiency tests because its definition is independent of any equilibrium model and its existence is incompatible with market efficiency. We provide a methodology to test for statistical arbitrage and then empirically investigate whether momentum and value trading strategies constitute statistical arbitrage opportunities. Despite adjusting for transaction costs, the influence of small stocks, margin requirements, liquidity buffers for the marking-to-market of short-sales, and higher borrowing rates, we find evidence that these strategies generate statistical arbitrage.

This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment styles. While we also allow for predictability in fund risk loadings and benchmark returns, the major source of investment profitability is predictability in managerial skills. In particular, long-only strategies that incorporate predictability in managerial skills outperform their Fung and Hsieh (2004) benchmarks by over 17% per year. The economic value of predictability obtains for different rebalancing horizons and alternative benchmark models. It is also robust to adjustments for backfill bias, incubation bias, illiquidity, fund termination, and style composition.

ABSTRACT We show that, motivated by sensation seeking, hedge fund managers who own powerful sports cars take on more investment risk but do not deliver higher returns, resulting in lower Sharpe ratios, information ratios, and alphas. Moreover, sensation‐seeking managers trade more frequently, actively, and unconventionally, and prefer lottery‐like stocks. We show further that some investors are themselves susceptible to sensation seeking and that sensation‐seeking investors fuel the demand for sensation‐seeking managers. While investors perceive sensation seekers to be less competent, they do not fully appreciate the superior investment skills of sensation‐avoiding fund managers.