Despite institutional investors' growing interest in funds of hedge funds, little attention has been paid so far to their added value and/or the sources of their added value. This is all the more striking in that funds of funds are far from transparent and are, with their double-fee structure, relatively costly investment vehicles. Our objective in this paper is to fill the gap and find out whether funds of funds add value through strategic allocation and active management. To this end, we ran

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... RBSA on a sample of 97 funds of funds over 1997/2004. 89% of the funds of funds turned out to add value at the strategic allocation level but only 31% at the active management level. Finally, only 20% of funds of funds created value through both strategic allocation and active management. In other words, if picking best performing funds is a challenging task, picking best performing funds of funds appears to be equally difficult.