Stochastic Dominance Analysis of CTA Funds

In this paper, we employ the stochastic dominance approach to rank the performance of commodity trading advisors (CTA) funds. An advantage of this approach is that it alleviates the problems that can arise if CTA returns are not normally distributed by utilizing the entire returns distribution. We find both first-order and higher-order stochastic dominance relationships amongst the CTA funds and conclude that investors would be better off investing in the first-order dominant funds to maximize their expected utilities and expected wealth. However, for higher-order dominant CTA, riskaverse investors can maximize their expected utilities but not their expected wealth. We conclude that the stochastic dominance approach is more appropriate compared with traditional approaches as a filter in the CTA selection process given that a meaningful economic interpretation of the results is possible as the entire return distribution is utilized when returns are non-normal