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Message:: [QUOTE="Cloudsweeper99, post: 1327999, member: 3011"]The actual study demonstrated that randomly chosen portfolios were likely to outperform professionally chosen portfolios because the random choices included the stocks of companies either too small, in out of favor industries, or that were financially weak, -- and these tended to be avoided by the professionals not to mention that the random portfolios didn't pay expenses or management fees.   This subsequently morphed into the idea that an index fund is likely to outperform professional management.  In recent years, the professionals have started to outperform the index funds by taking advantage of the index weakness of being capitalization weighted in the most popular stocks or price weighted in the stocks with the better prior performance.  So the index fund managers have changed the game again by coming up with funds weighted by earnings, dividends or other fundamental factors.  In the meantime, value investors have been outperforming both the index managers and other professionals for a very long time, putting to bed the lie that there is no metric that can be used to evaluate stocks. So the profession has advanced far beyond the chimp stories that were popular a few decades ago, but some folks are still stuck with the monkey mentality.[/QUOTE]