Performance of Passive Hedge Fund Replication Strategies

In this paper we extend Hasanhodzic and Lo (2007) by assessing the out-of-sample performance of various non-linear and conditional hedge fund replication models. We find that going beyond the linear case does not necessarily enhance the replication power. On the other hand, we find that selecting factors on the basis of an economic analysis can lead to a substantial improvement in out-of-sample replication quality, whatever the underlying form of the factor model. A revisited version of this paper was published in the March 2010 issue of European Financial Management.