Performance implications of hedging with industry ETFs

Abstract

Extant research documents that hedge funds which bet on positive earnings surprises manage their sector risk by shorting industry exchange-traded funds (ETFs). We add to this literature by evaluating the performance of a hypothetical hedge fund that can anticipate positive earnings news. We construct return series for a naked strategy that only takes long stock positions and a hedged strategy that also holds short positions in industry ETFs around earnings announcements with positive content. Our main result is that hedging with industry ETFs improves fund performance based on various reward-to-risk ratios. This finding holds in various equity subsamples and both strategies tend to perform better among riskier stocks. Hedging with industry ETFs boosts fund performance compared to hedging with a broad market index.