Article written by guest author Insider Monkey. Perhaps you've heard by now: Hedge
funds have underperformed the S&P 500 year to date as the index is up 13%
so far in 2013.
Of course, hedge funds are often specifically designed to
reduce an investor's exposure to the fluctuations of the overall market through
long/short or other low-beta strategies, so this is not exactly the most level
playing field on which to judge the utility of hedge funds.
In addition, when hedge funds can turn the full power of
their research teams on under-served areas of the market, such as small cap
stocks, we've shown that, far from being chronic underperformers, they can
actually be excellent sources of alpha.
How can we determine this? Several weeks after the end of
each quarter, each hedge fund
files a 13F with the SEC to disclose many of its long-equity positions as of
the end of the quarter. We track these filings in our database for a number of
purposes, including to help us research investment strategies.
Last summer we found that, on average, the most popular
small-cap stocks among hedge funds (measured by the quantity of funds in our
database reporting a position) tended to outperform the S&P 500 by 18
percentage points per year.
At this point, we went to work stock picking — identifying
which were the most popular small-cap picks based on 13Fs filed in November
2012. A number of these picks were merger targets; merger
arbitrage is one of those low-beta strategies we've mentioned, as
whether or not a deal closes is very weakly related to market conditions.
Let's take a look at the results since the beginning of
this year for the five most popular picks which remain publicly traded: United
Rentals (URI) is up 16%; Visteon (VC) has returned 34%; Tripadvisor (TRIP) is
up 58%; W.R. Grace (GRA) is trading
13% higher; and Marvell Technology (MRVL) has soared 78%. You don't need a calculator
to compare the average return of these names to the S&P's 13% gain, but
we'll do it anyway: 39.8%. It's fair to note that small-cap stocks tend to
outperform the overall market in good times, but still, Vanguard's small-cap
ETF (VB) is up only
19% year to date.
Now consider: this portfolio comes from information
released in November of last year, based on information about hedge-fund
holdings from September. Buying these stocks at the beginning of 2013 would
have been a very easy strategy to implement for investors with sufficient
capital to buy five stocks and, even with a very substantial delay, would have
resulted in a market-beating portfolio. These results are above what we've
found to be typical, but demonstrate that strategies based on hedge-fund
activity can realistically work.
Then why is it that overall hedge funds aren't beating the
market? A few reasons. First, as we've mentioned, hedge funds often hedge by
going short other stocks or the overall market in pursuit of absolute returns;
they may also pursue more market-neutral strategies, such as merger arbitrage
or investing in global macro instruments.
Second, the largest hedge fund positions — particularly
for successful funds that raise billions in capital from investors — tend to be
in large-cap stocks almost by necessity. Large caps are more closely followed
by large institutional investors and the financial media, and so it is harder
to generate alpha in these stocks.
When we looked at billionaire David Einhorn's
Greenlight Capital's 13Fs over time, we found that he gets a good deal of his
outperformance from small caps (read our
analysis here).
Third, of course, investors in hedge funds pay performance
fees. There are other reasons less positive for hedge funds as well — for
example, a number of funds have been long gold this year, with disastrous
results thus far.
Paying heavy fees to invest in a hedge fund is probably
not worth it for most investors who don't have to concern themselves with
finding investment opportunities uncorrelated with the rest of their portfolio
(as many institutional investors do).
However, on average, hedge funds' consensus small-cap
picks tend to do quite well. We believe that there are other strategies waiting
to be discovered as well, and of course, investors can take advantage of 13Fs
and the more up-to-date news from 13D and 13G filings (which occur when a fund
or other major investor owns at least 5% of a publicly traded company) to
identify free initial investment ideas.
Disclosure: none
