Raven the Chimp

Hi, I am Raven the Chimp, aka MonkeyDex. I'm a Movie Star, a Portfolio Wizard, a Guinness World Recorder.

I beat the market and most human traders. It's all in the wrist action!

Movie Star

I acted with Mickey Rooney in Babe: Pig in the City, one of the most underrated movie.

Trailer: imdb.com

Guinness World Recorder

In 1999, I was asked to pick my favorite stocks by throwing 10 darts at a list of 133 pre-selected equities, all the choices were then-high-tech internet companies. At the ripe old age of 6, I became the 22nd Most Successful Money Manager in the US for 1999.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-successful-chimpanzee-on-wall-street

Los Angeles, 1999

Image source: Reuters

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

All this monkey business started in 1973 when Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel claimed in his bestselling book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street:

A Blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.

Andrew Tobias calls this book one of only a few great investment books ever written. Burton Malkiel served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1975 through 1977.

Review of A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Trent Hamm
https://www.thesimpledollar.com/review-a-random-walk-down-wall-street/

Summary of the book by Lucio Buffalmano
https://thepowermoves.com/a-random-walk-down-wall-street-summary/

The MonkeyDex Index

My shares selection, in 1999 delivered a 213% gain, outperforming more than 6,000 professional brokers and money managers on Wall Street, quadrupling the return of the Dow and doubling the return of the NASDAQ. My picks were so impressive that they created the Monkeydex, an index based around my picks, thrown with a dart.

My picks for 1999:

• AudioHighway (Nasdaq:AHWY), down 21%
• CMGI Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), up 935%
• iMall (Nasdaq:IMAL), bought out
• Inktomi (Nasdaq:INKT), up 177%
• ISS Group (Nasdaq:ISSX), up 158%
• Kushner-Locke (Nasdaq:KLOC), down 36%
• Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), up 194%
• Netspeak (Nasdaq:NSPK), up 88%
• Onsale (Nasdaq:ONSL), bought out
• Ozemail, merged with MCI WorldComm (WCOM)

My picks for 2000:

• Audible.com (Nasdaq:ADBL)
• Broadcom (Nasdaq:BRCM)
• eToys (Nasdaq:ETYS)
• Litronic (Nasdaq:LNTX)
• Medium4.com (OTCBB:METV)
• Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS)
• N2H2 (Nasdaq:NTWO)
• Prodigy (Nasdaq:PRGY)
• Software.com (Nasdaq:SWCM)
• StarMedia (Nasdaq:STRM)

Business Wire's press release Monkey Trumps Wall Street With 200 Percent Gain

Following the crash of Internet values, the index had collapsed, and the experiment had stopped.

My new picks for 2020 are coming soon!

Animal Traders

Why would someone have monkeys do investing? Why not a cat, or rats?

Mr. Adam Monk

Adam Monk worked for the Chicago Sun-Times. He's a Brazilian cinnamon-ring tail cebus monkey who picked stocks by circling them in the newspaper with a red pen. He outperformed the indexes four years in a row, from 2003 to 2006, and he did it again in 2008 with a portfolio that only lost 14% while most money managers were losing upwards of 35%

Image source

Lusha

The circus chimpanzee Lusha did very well in Russia. Her portfolio topped 94% of Russia's mutual funds.

Image source

Orlando the Cat

Orlando the cat is feline fine about his stock picks for 2012. His portfolio is purrfect! To celebrate his success, Orlando's owner, former Cash editor Jill Insley, has bought him a red collar in the style of Urquhart-Stewart's omnipresent red braces.

Image source

Raratttraders

RARATTTRADERS are rats with good pedigree working to build a software generating real time ticker tracks: Mss. Kleinworth, Mss. Coutts, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Lehmann.

https://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/rat-traders

Hire a Monkey!

“Malkiel was wrong,” stated Rob Arnott, CEO of Research Affiliates, while speaking at the IMN Global Indexing and ETFs conference earlier this month. “The monkeys have done a much better job than both the experts and the stock market.”
Source: Forbes

The result indicates that the "random walk hypothesis" by Burton Malkiel is perhaps truer than we thought. Technical analysis and fundamental analysis do not work.

Any honest advisor will tell you that there is no reason to invest in a managed mutual fund. But investment companies don't really want you to invest for a retirement fund in an S&P Index fund, since their profits are based on transactions and management fees. You can't trust someone who stands to profit from the advice they are giving you. Even without monkeys, it's still a jungle out there.

Still not convinced? Hire a monkey and try it for yourself! That will bring you a lot of bananas!

Please don’t hurt the monkey if it underperforms!

Image source

Stay tuned. My shares selection for the year 2020 is coming soon.