Abstract

Hedge funds have return peculiarities not commonly associated with traditional investment vehicles. Specifically, hedge funds seem more inclined to produce return distributions with significantly non-normal skewness and kurtosis. There is also growing acceptance of the notion that investor preferences are better represented by bilinear utility functions or S-shaped value functions than by neo-classical utility functions such as power utility. Many investors have therefore concluded that mean-variance optimization is not appropriate for forming portfolios that include hedge funds.