Evaluating Investments Using Higher Moments

This paper compares performance of long-short equity hedge funds with the market index by using mean-variance criteria and criteria including higher moments. Based on the mean-variance criteria, the majority of the long-short equity hedge funds outperform the market index. When higher moments are used to evaluate the performance, a greater proportion of the hedge funds underperform the market index. This implies the importance of including higher moments in portfolio optimization.