Jensen’s Alpha
Measuring the performance of a portfolio just by looking at its return is not a good idea. First, the performance of the fund is not risk adjusted. Thus even though the portfolio has a higher return than another, this may just be attributed to more risk, or even more risk than justified by its performance. Secondly, the portfolio may even realized a negative return. Negative portfolio return do not necessarily indicate bad performance. This is because the market may have performed even worse. A good performance metric thus accommodates for the risk taken and optionally, measures the performance relative benchmark
Jensen’s Alpha formula
The Jensen’s Alpha is another popular performance measure used to measure the retaliative performance of a portfolio. The Jensen’s alpha is the result of the following regression, where stands for the portfolio return over time, the market return, the risk free rate, the systematic risk component and the Jensen ‘alpha.