A new study indicates that hedge funds are more consistent performers than most commonly think. Conducted by Ravi Jagannathan, a finance professor at Northwestern University, Alexey Malakhov of the University of Arkansas and Goldman Sachs associate Dmitry Novikov, the report debunks the myth that a top performing hedge fund in one quarter is unlikely to put together a winning streak in subsequent periods. The authors point out that most HF studies of the past did not adjust for statistical problems in hedge fund databases, most notably the so-called “self-selection bias,” when some funds disappear either because they don’t perform well or they perform so well they close to new investors and stop reporting. Jagannathan corrected this flaw, The New York Times reports, by studying the performance of those hedge funds that dropped out of the database and making educated guesses about how they would perform. According to the Times, those guesses helped the researchers find “evidence of performance persistence.” Jagannathan, in an interview, said hedge funds’ performance advantage “last far longer” than it does for mutual funds.