This paper assesses the aspect of market neutrality for a pairs trading strategy built on cointegration. This was conducted by evaluating the strategy?s performance during a negative market environment, 2007-06-01 to 2008-12-30, and a positive market environment, 2013-05-31 to 2014-12-30, for the stocks listed in the OMXS30 index. The results indicate market neutrality and that profitability of pairs trading is higher in prolonged periods of turbulence.

<p>Reading the daily financial news, it becomes quite obvious that hedge funds are receiving huge attention by financial analysts and politicians. Many people fear the influence of hedge funds on single companies as well as on the global economy.</p><p>This study does not judge the behavior of hedge funds. Instead, it focuses on the nature of hedge funds and their mystique image. Especially the common view of their market neutral performance is of interest, which is theoretically achieved through the use of derivatives and short positions. In this thesis the feature of market neutrality is investigated in depth, since it can improve the overall performance of investors’ portfolios in bull as well as in bear markets through diversification effects.</p><p>Therefore the hedge funds and their environment, the capital markets, are examined from an academically point of view by emphasizing on the following research questions:</p><p>1. Are hedge funds performing market neutral in bull and bear markets?</p><p>2. To what extent should they be included in optimal risky portfolios according to Modern Portfolio Theory and advanced performance measurement tools, considering their degree of market neutrality?</p><p>This study is based on extensive knowledge of financial and econometric theories. Capital market theories, modern portfolio theory, hedge fund data and econometric knowledge about time series analysis build the basis for further investigations and are necessary to understand the characteristics of hedge funds and hedge fund data.</p><p>In order to be able to deal with the shortcomings of hedge fund data, an analytical framework for the preparation of data is created that enables the authors to start with the analysis of these questions. The framework is applicable to all kinds of hedge funds presented in this thesis and enables the reader to test further hedge fund classes by himself.</p><p>In a quantitative study the created framework is applied to 2160 hedge funds of Barclays Hedge Fund Database, which builds the basis for analyzing market neutrality. Further input for the portfolio optimization consists of 19 hedge fund indices, which were provided by the Greenwich Alternative Investment Hedge Fund Database and 4 benchmark indices for the stock and bond market.</p><p>The analysis consists of two different parts. For the first research question various correlation and return matrices are constructed, which shall provide information about market neutrality of hedge funds. A correlation matrix also serves as important input for the portfolio analysis and therefore builds the basis for the analysis of the second research question. This shall provide some fundamental recommendations about the weighting of diverse hedge fund classes in optimal risky portfolios.</p><p>The conducted analysis demonstrated clearly the following findings:</p><p>1. Market neutrality has to be rejected for most hedge fund strategies. It is only attainable through strategies, which focus more on arbitrage and/or the bond market and therefore seems to be more a by-product than an actually provoked feature.</p><p>2. Only two strategies, equity short and convertible arbitrage, managed to beat the benchmark and to improve the overall performance of the portfolio when taking the specific return distribution of hedge funds into account.</p>

Reading the daily financial news, it becomes quite obvious that hedge funds are receiving huge attention by financial analysts and politicians. Many people fear the influence of hedge funds on single companies as well as on the global economy. This study does not judge the behavior of hedge funds. Instead, it focuses on the nature of hedge funds and their mystique image. Especially the common view of their market neutral performance is of interest, which is theoretically achieved through the use of derivatives and short positions. In this thesis the feature of market neutrality is investigated in depth, since it can improve the overall performance of investors’ portfolios in bull as well as in bear markets through diversification effects. Therefore the hedge funds and their environment, the capital markets, are examined from an academically point of view by emphasizing on the following research questions: 1. Are hedge funds performing market neutral in bull and bear markets? 2. To what extent should they be included in optimal risky portfolios according to Modern Portfolio Theory and advanced performance measurement tools, considering their degree of market neutrality? This study is based on extensive knowledge of financial and econometric theories. Capital market theories, modern portfolio theory, hedge fund data and econometric knowledge about time series analysis build the basis for further investigations and are necessary to understand the characteristics of hedge funds and hedge fund data. In order to be able to deal with the shortcomings of hedge fund data, an analytical framework for the preparation of data is created that enables the authors to start with the analysis of these questions. The framework is applicable to all kinds of hedge funds presented in this thesis and enables the reader to test further hedge fund classes by himself. In a quantitative study the created framework is applied to 2160 hedge funds of Barclays Hedge Fund Database, which builds the basis for analyzing market neutrality. Further input for the portfolio optimization consists of 19 hedge fund indices, which were provided by the Greenwich Alternative Investment Hedge Fund Database and 4 benchmark indices for the stock and bond market. The analysis consists of two different parts. For the first research question various correlation and return matrices are constructed, which shall provide information about market neutrality of hedge funds. A correlation matrix also serves as important input for the portfolio analysis and therefore builds the basis for the analysis of the second research question. This shall provide some fundamental recommendations about the weighting of diverse hedge fund classes in optimal risky portfolios. The conducted analysis demonstrated clearly the following findings: 1. Market neutrality has to be rejected for most hedge fund strategies. It is only attainable through strategies, which focus more on arbitrage and/or the bond market and therefore seems to be more a by-product than an actually provoked feature. 2. Only two strategies, equity short and convertible arbitrage, managed to beat the benchmark and to improve the overall performance of the portfolio when taking the specific return distribution of hedge funds into account.

In this thesis we study the utility maximization problem for assets whose prices are cointegrated, which arises from the investment practice of convergence trading and its special forms, pairs trading and spread trading. The major theme in the first two chapters of the thesis, is to investigate the assumption of market-neutrality of the optimal convergence trading strategies, which is a ubiquitous assumption taken by practitioners and academics alike. This assumption lacks a theoretical justification and, to the best of our knowledge, the only relevant study is Liu and Timmermann (2013) which implies that the optimal convergence strategies are, in general, not market-neutral. We start by considering a minimalistic pairs-trading scenario with two cointegrated stocks and solve the Merton investment problem with power and logarithmic utilities. We pay special attention to when/if the stochastic control problem is well-posed, which is overlooked in the study done by Liu and Timmermann (2013). In particular, we show that the problem is ill-posed if and only if the agent’s risk-aversion is less than a constant which is an explicit function of the market parameters. This condition, in turn, yields the necessary and sufficient condition for well-posedness of the Merton problem for all possible values of agent’s risk-aversion. The resulting well-posedness condition is surprisingly strict and, in particular, is equivalent to assuming the optimal investment strategy in the stocks to be market-neutral. Furthermore, it is shown that the well-posedness condition is equivalent to applying Novikov’s condition to the market-price of risk, which is a ubiquitous sufficient condition for imposing absence of arbitrage. To the best of our knowledge, these are the only theoretical results for supporting the assumption of market-neutrality of convergence trading strategies. We then generalise the results to the more realistic setting of multiple cointegrated assets, assuming risk factors that effects the asset returns, and general utility functions for investor’s preference. In the process of generalising the bivariate results, we also obtained some well-posedness conditions for matrix Riccati differential equations which are, to the best of our knowledge, new. In the last chapter, we set up and justify a Merton problem that is related to spread-trading with two futures assets and assuming proportional transaction costs. The model possesses three characteristics whose combination makes it different from the existing literature on proportional transaction costs: 1) finite time horizon, 2) Multiple risky assets 3) stochastic opportunity set. We introduce the HJB equation and provide rigorous arguments showing that the corresponding value function is the viscosity solution of the HJB equation. We end the chapter by devising a numerical scheme, based on the penalty method of Forsyth and Vetzal (2002), to approximate the viscosity solution of the HJB equation.