Revisões de disclosure dos fundos de hedge: da pra acreditar?

In this paper, we closely examine hedge fund disclosures to these publicly available databases, and provide empirical evidence to underpin the current debate on hedge fund disclosure regulation. We are particularly interested in whether these voluntary disclosures by hedge funds are reliable guides to their past performance. We attempt to answer this question by tracking changes to statements of performance in these databases recorded at different points in time between 2007 and 2011. In each “vintage” of these databases, hedge funds provide information on their performance from the time they began reporting to the database until the most recent period. We find evidence that, in successive vintages of these databases, older performance records (going as far back as 15 years) of hedge funds are routinely revised. This behavior is widespread: 49% of the 12,128 hedge funds in our sample revised their previous returns by at least 0.01% at least once, nearly 30% of funds revised a previous monthly return by at least 0.5%, and over 20% revised a previous monthly return by at least 1%. These are very substantial changes, comparable to or exceeding the average monthly return in our sample period of 0.62%.

While positive revisions are also commonplace, negative revisions are more common and larger when they occur, that is, on average, initially provided returns present a more rosy picture of hedge fund performance than final performance figures. This suggests that prospective investors could be wooed into making decisions based on initially reported histories that are then subsequently revised. Moreover, the revisions are not random. Indeed, we find that information on the characteristics and past performance of hedge funds can predict their propensity to revise. For example, funds-of-hedge-funds and hedge funds in the Emerging Markets style are significantly more likely to revise their histories of returns than Managed Futures funds. Larger funds, more volatile funds, and less liquid funds are also more likely to revise.

Several characteristics of revising funds suggest the nature of incentives that may drive revising behavior. For example, a fund experiencing a change in management company or manager is 10% more likely to revise its past returns, holding all else constant. Following such events, we hypothesize that new management might be interested in a “fresh start,” revamping the accounting, marking-to-market, auditing, and compliance practices of their newly acquired funds, thus resulting in a sequence of revisions to past returns.Another important characteristic associated with revising behavior is the presence of a high-water mark in the fund. Managers may have greater incentives to revise past returns downwards (or simply to correct previous valuation errors only in the positive direction) when they are well below their high-water marks, so as to reset the level at which they begin earning performance fees. Consistent with this explanation, we find that funds with a high-water mark are 13% more likely to revise than those without a high-water mark. Moreover, when funds with a high-water mark revise returns, their average return revision is −62 basis points. In contrast, funds without a high-water mark provision have average return revisions of +40 basis points. This allows for a refinement of our finding that the unconditional average return revision is negative: funds with an incentive to revise returns below high-water marks revise downwards on average, whereas funds without high-water marks revise returns upwards, making past returns appear higher in subsequent revisions.

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Fonte: PATTON, A. J., RAMADORAI, T. and STREATFIELD, M. (2015), Change You Can Believe In? Hedge Fund Data Revisions. The Journal of Finance, 70: 963–999. doi: 10.1111/jofi.12240