The Wall Street Journal’s Dartboard Contest
Meet Your New Money Manager
Economist Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street held that because financial markets are “informationally efficient,” an investor can’t consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns on a risk-adjusted basis. He drove the point home with the contention that that even a blindfolded monkey throwing darts could do as good a job in picking stocks as a professional money manager.
Game On
The Wall Street Journal created it’s famous Dartboard Contest in 1988 to test the theory. The Journal made random stock picks and compared these to picks by investment experts as well as those of readers, and, in 1998 published the results of the 100th dartboard contest.
Results: Not Very Impressive
The results appear to show that nobody’s really able to consistently outperform the market:
- The experts beat the monkeys only 61% of the time.
- The experts essentially…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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