Leon Cooperman drives a used Passat. David Einhorn an old Honda Odyssey. Paul Tudor Jones, meanwhile, has 2 Cadillac Escalades, a Mercedes GL450 and a Maybach, among other luxury vehicles.

So, what does it all mean?  A new study entitled "Sensation Seeking, Sports Cars, and Hedge Funds," concludes what you would expect: the faster the car, the more likely the owner is a risk-taker.

"We find that hedge fund managers who own powerful sports cars take on more investment risk," wrote Yan Lu of the University of Central Florida, Sugata Ray of the University of Florida and Melvyn Teo of the Singapore Management University. "The incremental risk taking by performance car buyers does not translate to higher returns."

Interestingly, the converse is also true: Drivers of minivans tend to deliver less volatile returns, the authors found.

Bolstering their point, the authors further found that drivers of sports cars are more likely to terminate their funds and to report regulatory and criminal violations than the average fund manager - while drivers of "practical but unexciting cars" are less likely to do so.

For the discerning investor who could care less about the driving habits of hedge funders, there’s a bottom-line takeaway: Fancy drivers deliver lower risk-adjusted returns. A one-standard-deviation increase in horsepower correlates to a 0.18 reduction in a fund manager’s Sharpe ratio – that is, a 21.4% decrease relative to the entire data set.