Beta Active Hedge Fund Management

We reconsider whether hedge funds’ time-varying risk factor exposures are predictive of superior performance. We construct an overall measure (BA) of fund managers and present evidence that top beta active managers deliver superior long-term out-of-sample performance compared to top alpha active managers. BA captures the time-varying nature of beta exposures and can be interpreted as a common factor of both systematic risk (SR) and (1 - R 2 ) measures. BA also compares favorably to extant measures of market timing, capturing the explanatory power of such measures of hedge fund performance.