Are monkeys suitable fund managers .......?

Research by London’s Cass Business School shows that randomly chosen portfolios — that might as well have been picked by monkeys — are overwhelmingly likely to beat market-cap-weighted indices. But most monkeys failed to match equal-weighted indices, or indices based on most sophisticated measures to limit risk.

So the hierarchy is that simple equal weighting indices beat monkeys, who beat value-weighted indices like the S&P, which beats the average active manager (who nonetheless complains that the S&P benchmark is unfair).

Yet our money is still mostly run by active managers, while none that I am aware of is run by monkeys. For these reasons, and many more, we need to know more about indices.


Interesting article in FT showing that monkeys might be suitable candidates (and probably cost efficient ones) to pick stocks.

I have posted about animals punching above their weight before.

The above article in FT is actually more regarding equally weighted indices:


S&P has long published an equal-weighted 500 index, in which each stock is 0.2 per cent of the index. This is probably a more valid benchmark than the S&P 500 itself — and as the chart shows, it is much harder to beat. The mere act of regular rebalancing needed to keep it equal-weighted means taking profits in gainers and buying stocks that have recently fallen — which is good. It also overweights smaller and cheaper stocks, which do well in the long run.


Wiki: The FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI, also known as the FBM KLCI, is a capitalisation-weighted stock market index, composed of the 30 largest companies on the Bursa Malaysia by market capitalisation that meet the eligibility requirements of the FTSE Bursa Malaysia Index Ground Rules.

The same applies to the EMAS index.