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Aqr Momentum Fund

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Submitted By Karenchan2015
Words 2849
Pages 12
Overview
Momentum is a phenomenon shows that well-performed stocks continue to outperform their peers while poor-performed stocks continue to underperform. Thus, more mutual funds use this powerful strategy to draw a broad range of investors by getting higher risk-adjusted returns. AQR is a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut, offering investing products that applies price phenomenon known as momentum. This case study enables investors to get a closer look at AQR’s momentum fund.

Comparison of momentum specifications
In order to analyze the momentum effect of different specifications, stocks were divided into ‘winner’ stocks and ‘loser’ stocks according to their rankings.
From the data we can see that the decile spread portfolio return is the highest among these momentum specifications. One may argue that the spread between decile 10 and decile 1 is largest and it also has the highest volatility. After adjusting for volatility (using Sharpe Ratio), the decile spread momentum advantage is reduced but still very significant.
According to Figure 1.1 and 1.2, raw spread returns witness a sharp decrease as the chosen percentile of highest and lowest stock return increases. After adjusted by volatility, the difference becomes flatter but still significant. From the graphs we can see that the volatility-adjusted return of decile spread is higher than the UMD spread, which means buying top 10% winner stocks and shorting bottom 10% loser stocks earns more profit than buying top 30% winner stocks and shorting bottom 30% loser stocks. This further proves the momentum effect in the stocks since the top-ranking winner stocks keep ‘winning’ more than those rank behind them and the worst loser stocks lose more than those rank in front of them. Figure 1.2
And the momentum effect of these specification ranks as follows (see table 1): decile spread> quintile

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