CTA Performance Persistence: 1994–2010

Abstract

This article tests the performance persistence hypothesis for Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), considering the impact of incubation and backfill bias. The authors apply the Fama-MacBeth approach and quintile analysis, and conclude that ranking CTAs using the t-statistic of alpha with respect to a CTA benchmark is predictive of future returns. The authors provide evidence that the identified strong persistence of the best-performing funds may be driven solely by the incubation and backfill biases. They find that the worst-performing funds have a higher probability of liquidation than those of the other quintiles, and the top-performing funds have a higher conditional probability of staying top performers versus becoming worst performers than that of the worst performing funds.