We estimate investable comoment equity risk premiums for the US markets. The stock's contribution to the asymmetry and the fat tails of the market portfolio's payoff are priced into a coskewness premium and a cokurtosis premium. We construct zero-investment strategies that are long and short in coskewness and cokurtosis equity risks; we infer from the spread the returns attached to a unit exposure to US equity coskewness and cokurtosis. The coskewness and cokurtosis premiums present positive monthly average returns of 0.27% and 0.14% from January 1959 to December 2011. Comoment risks appear to be significantly priced within the US stock market and display significant explanatory power regarding the US size and book-to-market effects. The premiums do not subsume, but rather complement the empirical capital asset pricing model. Our analysis relies on data collected from CRSP (Chicago Research Center for Security Prices) over December 1955 to December 2011. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to propose investable higher-moment risk factors over such an extensive time period.

We estimate investable comoment equity risk premiums for the US markets. The stock's contribution to the asymmetry and the fat tails of the market portfolio's payoff are priced into a coskewness premium and a cokurtosis premium. We construct zero-investment strategies that are long and short in coskewness and cokurtosis equity risks; we infer from the spread the returns attached to a unit exposure to US equity coskewness and cokurtosis. The coskewness and cokurtosis premiums present positive monthly average returns of 0.27% and 0.14% from January 1959 to December 2011. Comoment risks appear to be significantly priced within the US stock market and display significant explanatory power regarding the US size and book-to-market effects. The premiums do not subsume, but rather complement the empirical capital asset pricing model. Our analysis relies on data collected from CRSP (Chicago Research Center for Security Prices) over December 1955 to December 2011. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to propose investable higher-moment risk factors over such an extensive time period.

Factor performance is highly sensitive to the number of stocks composing its long and short basis portfolios. We examine three methodological choices that have an impact on portfolio diversification: the (in)dependence and the (a)symmetry of the stock sorting procedure and the sorting breakpoints. We show that these methodological choices have to be considered jointly and that a dependent (D) sort that starts with the control variables with whole sample or "name" (N) breakpoints and that performs a symmetric (S) sort on characteristics minimizes the biases from unpriced risks. This paper also demonstrates that the biases introduced by currently popular sorting methodologies can become very severe under specific market conditions and are not driven by small capitalizations. This alternative framework generates much stronger "turn-of-the-year" size and "through-the-year" book-to-market effects than what is conventionally documented.

We investigate how macroeconomic indicators alter the dynamic risk exposure of different hedge fund style strategies. We implement a multifactor model to estimate the unobservable timevarying risk exposure conditional to macroeconomic information and a VAR to measure the impact of macroeconomic predictors on different time horizons. Using monthly returns on a cross-section of 10 different style indices from February 1997 to August 2019, we find that, on average, macroeconomic indicators explain approximately 30%, 55%, and 75% variability of betas at 1-, 6-, and 36-months horizons, respectively. Although macroeconomic predictors play a critical role at every horizon, at 1-month the dominating effect comes from idiosyncratic shocks, which indicates that in the short run hedge fund managers mostly rely on their own reallocation signals.Moreover, consistent with the fundamental drivers of the smart beta factors, we find that interest rate level and GDP growth similarly impact hedge fund exposures across styles.