abstract: I study the performance of hedge fund managers, using quarterly stock holdings from 1995 to 2010. I use the holdings-based measure built on Ferson and Mo (2012) to decompose a manager's overall performance into stock selection and three components of timing ability: market return, volatility, and liquidity. At the aggregate level, I find that hedge fund managers have stock picking skills but no timing skills, and overall I do not find strong evidence to support their superiority. I show that the lack of abilities is driven by the large fluctuations of timing performance with market conditions. I find that conditioning information, equity capital constraints, and priority in stocks to liquidate can partly explain the weak evidence. At the individual fund level, bootstrap analysis results suggest that even top managers' abilities cannot be separated from luck. Also, I find that hedge fund managers exhibit short-horizon persistence in selectivity skill. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Business Administration 2013

In the thesis, we investigate whether hedge fund managers have liquidity timing skills in the fixed income market, foreign exchange market and commodity market, respectively. Managers with the liquidity timing skills can strategically adjust hedge funds exposure to the target financial market based on their forecasts about the future changes in market liquidity. We find empirical evidence that hedge funds in certain categories have the skills to time the liquidity levels in the fixed income market, foreign exchange market and commodity market. We conduct a range of robustness tests, which show that hedge funds still exhibit liquidity timing skills after controlling for the factors that may affect timing ability. In particular, our findings are robust to the usage of leverage, funding constraints, investor redemption restrictions, hedge funds trades on market liquidity, financial crisis, hedge fund data biases, market return and volatility timing, liquidity risk factor, systematic stale pricing and option factors. We also conduct bootstrap analysis to ensure the results are not dependent on the normality assumption. Our investigation is helpful to understand the importance of market liquidity to hedge funds professional portfolio management.