Are Funds of Hedge Funds Efficient? An Empirical Analysis for North American, Asia Pacific, and European Long/Short Funds of Hedge Funds

This study aims to examine whether long/short funds of hedge funds truly provide better diversification benefits to hedge fund investors as compared to efficient portfolios of long/short hedge funds in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Data of long/short hedge funds and long/short FOHFs are obtained from Eurekahedge databases from 1st January 2008 to 31st December 2016. Mean-variance optimization method is employed to construct efficient portfolios of 100 long/short hedge funds with highest Sharpe ratios for each of the selected regions. To ensure the robustness of our findings, two rolling windows of observation are set up for a comparative analysis. This study concludes that most of the single-region focused long/short FOHFs in the sample, did not outperform the constructed efficient portfolios of long/short hedge funds investing in the same region. In fact, many long/short FOHFs did not survive more than a period of six years as observed in this study.