Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective

"Andrew Lo's Hedge Funds is likely to be the high-water mark in the analysis of hedge funds for years to come. Focusing on hedge fund returns and trading strategies, risk characteristics, and potential for illiquidity, Lo brings to bear his always fresh and insightful thinking."--Richard Bookstaber, author of A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

"Lo offers a truly unique perspective. He examines the properties of returns and illiquidity in great detail and introduces an innovative concept of mean-variance-liquidity optimization, something that no other book on hedge funds has addressed."--Narayan Y. Naik, London Business School

"This book provides a useful and very timely overview of key aspects of the hedge fund industry. It summarizes the basic properties of hedge fund returns, discusses why traditional performance measures may be misleading when analyzing hedge fund performance, and highlights important issues such as serial correlation, return smoothing, and illiquidity."--Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University

The Economist

Anyone who is considering investing in hedge funds, or is involved in regulating the financial-services industry, should give it a go.

Andrew W. Lo is the Harris & Harris Group Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He is the coauthor of "A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street" and "The Econometrics of Financial Markets" (both Princeton).