Quote from al trader:
There are many different categories of hedge funds from convertible arbitrage’, ‘short bias’, ‘global
macro’ and managed futures, etc. The most important category is missing! It is the category of
‘high frequency finance hedge funds’. High frequency finance managers use tick by tick market
data as an input to their statistically driven quantitative models. They use tick by tick data, not
only to optimise the timing of their trades, but also to generate the initial recommendation of their
trades.
Why is it necessary to create a separate category? The purpose of creating categories of hedge
funds is to make it easier to track the performance of a manager, a particular category and to
make peer to peer comparisons of different managers within one category.
Hedge fund managers using the methodology of high frequency finance have a very different risk
return profile to other hedge fund managers. In particular, they can build models that are far more
adaptive to changing market environments. Furthermore, their models have a much longer life
time than traditional models developed on the basis of low frequency data.