Wall Street chumps lose out to chimp

A chimpanzee that chose her portfolio of internet stocks by chucking darts at a list of companies has been hailed a financial whiz kid by her keeper.

Six-year-old Raven delivered a 213% gain on 1999, outperforming most of the yuppies on Wall Street. Indeed, had she been employed at a Wall Street mutual fund, it's claimed her performance would have ranked as the 22nd best money manager in the country — outperforming more than 6000 Wall Street pro's.

The monkey business began in January 1999 when Raven lobbed darts at a list of 133 internet-related stocks, to create her own financial index, MonkeyDex. During the last year her selection has just surpassed all expectations.

"She quadrupled the performance of the Dow and doubled the performance of the Nasdaq composite", said Roland Perry, editor of the Internet Stock Review and creator of the MonkeyDex. "Not bad considering she wasn't able to participate in any of the hot new-issue offerings", he said.

Raven recently returned to Wall Street to pick this year's selection from 281 internet-related stocks. They are: Audible.com, Broadcom, eToys, Litronic, Medium4.com, Lycos, N2H2, Prodigy, Software.com and StarMedia.

[Posted at <http://www.nettime.org>.]

From GLW issue 391