Mario Fischer is the winner of this year’s "BAI Wissenschaftspreis" offered by the "Bundesverband Alternative Investments e.V." for his diploma thesis "Special Situation Fonds”.  Matthias Hanauer and Dr. Udo Seifert (MEAG) supervised the thesis, which has been written at the Department of Financial Management and Capital Markets of Professor Dr. Christoph Kaserer.

The diploma thesis focuses on the increasing popularity and enormous growth of special situation funds over the last decade. Therefore the goals are to classify these upcoming funds into the existing investment universe and provide first empirical evidence in the form of fund characteristics and absolute as well as risk-adjusted returns. After identifying special situation funds as the third category of event-driven hedge funds in theory, the study analyzes data on 27 single hedge funds and 43 single mutual funds during the time period from 1998 to 2012. Beside considerable differences in the characteristics like assets under management, fees and minimum investment, the thesis documents for both categories of special situation funds significant alphas and higher Sharpe Ratios than for the overall market. In addition, hedge funds are less correlated to the overall stock market than mutual funds and hence can have valuable diversification effects for institutional investors’ portfolios. For more information about the "BAI Wissenschaftspreis", please click here.

Some of the main results are also published in CORPORATE FINANCE biz (5/2013).