William N. Goetzmann

Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival and Performance, 1989-1995

We examine the performance of the off-shore hedge fund industry over the period 1989-1995 using a database that includes both defunct and currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds, low covariance with the U.S. stock market, evidence consistent with positive risk-adjusted returns over the time, but little evidence of differential manager skill.

Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth Century

Long-term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Copyright The American Finance Association 1999.

Careers and Survival: Competition and Risk in the Hedge Fund and CTA Industry

Investors in hedge funds and commodity trading advisors (CTAs) are concerned with risk as well as return. We investigate the volatility of hedge funds and CTAs in light of managerial career concerns. We find an association between past performance and risk levels consistent with previous findings for mutual fund managers. Variance shifts depend upon relative rather than absolute fund performance. The importance of relative rankings points to the importance of reputation costs in the investment industry. Our analysis of factors contributing to fund disappearance shows that survival depends on absolute and relative performance, excess volatility, and on fund age. Copyright The American Finance Association 2001.

The Single Family Home in the Investment Portfolio

This article uses recent measures of the risk and return to investment in housing to estimate the effects of including a single family home in the investor portolio. We estimate the expected return and standard deviation of that return, as well as its correlation with other major investment classes.

Re-Emerging Markets

Recent research shows that emerging markets are distinguished by high returns and low covariances with global market factors. To check whether these results can be attributed to their recent emergence, we simulate a simple, general model of global markets, with a realistic survival process. The simulations reveal a number of new effects. We find that pre-emergence returns are systematically lower than post-emergence returns, and that the brevity of a market history is related to the bias in returns as well as to the world beta. These patterns are confirmed by an empirical analysis of emerging and submerged markets.

The accuracy of real estate indices: Repeat sale estimators

Simulation techniques allow us to examine the behavior and accuracy of several repeat sales regression estimators used to construct real estate return indices. We show that the generalized least squares (GLS) method is the maximum likelihood estimator, and we show how estimation accuracy can be significantly improved through a Baysian approach. In addition, we introduce a biased estimation procedure based upon the James and Stein method to address the problems of multicollinearity common to the procedure.

Index Funds and Stock Market Growth

We use 2 years of daily flows for three major Standard and Poors index funds to analyze the relationship among index funds, asset prices, and volatility. We find strong contemporaneous correlation between inflows and returns, no evidence for positive feedback trading, and evidence that negative market returns may induce subsequent sales. Market volatility affects investors as dynamic risk sharing, but higher volatility does not drive investors from the market. Bullish newsletter sentiment is associated with greater inflows. We report high correlation among investor disagreement and market uncertainty and flows. Dispersion in advice and open interest correlate with lower inflows.

Day Trading International Mutual Funds: Evidence And Policy Solutions

Daily pricing of mutual funds provides liquidity to investors but is subject to valuation errors due to the inability to observe synchronous, fair security prices at the end of the trading day. This mayhurt fund investor if speculatior strategiclly seek to exploit mispricing or if the net flow of money into funds is correlated with these pricing eerrors. We show that mutual funds are exposed to speculative traders by using a simple day trading rule that yields large profits in a sample of 391 U.S.-based open-end international mutual funds. We propose a simple “fair pricing” mechanism that alleviated these concerns by correcting net asset values for stale prices. We argue that fund companies and regulatiors should look at alternatives that allow funds to offer fair prciing to investors, which, in turn, decreases the need to resort to monitoring for day traders and redemption penalties.

A Longer Look at Dividend Yields

This article re-examines the evidence on the ability of dividend yields to predict long-horizon stock returns. We use two new series beginning in 1871, a monthly series for the United States, and an annual series for the United Kingdom. Conditional on survival over the entire 122 years, dividend yields display only marginal ability to predict stock market returns in either country. We also argue that tests over long periods may be affected by survivorship. Simulations show that regression statistics based on a sample drawn solely from surviving markets can be seriously biased towards finding predictability.

A New Historical Database For The NYSE 1815 To 1925: Performance And Predictability

In this paper, we collect individual stock prices for NYSE stocks over the period 1815 to 1925 and individual dividend data over the period 1825 to 1870. We use monthly price and dividend information on more than 600 individual securities over the period to estimate a stock price index and total return series that extends virtually to the beginning of the New York Stock Exchange. We use this data to estimate the power of past returns and dividend yields to forecast future long-horizon returns. We find some evidence of predictabiity in sub-periods but little predictability over the long term. We estimate the time-varying volatility of the U.S. market over the period 1815 to 1925 and find evidence of a leverage effect on risk. This new database will allow future researchers to test a broad range of hypotheses about the U.S. capital markets in a rich, untouched sample.