Who's Better at Picking Stocks: r/WallStreetBets or a Goldfish?

Michael Reeves has carved out a unique niche in the online world through his comedy-tech videos, combining his programming skills and love of modern technology with rapid fire jokes and satire.

In his latest production, he’s taken on the world of meme investing, as represented by the favorite stocks pitched by top contributors to r/WallStreetBets, and pitted them against pure random selection, as represented by the stock picks of his pet goldfish. In the following 15-minute video (featuring some NSFW language and visual humor), he explains how he did it and presents his experimental results:

Our favorite part is when he pitches the “FISH” system to potential investors.

Reeves’ experiment makes sense in the light of the real results of the Wall Street Journal‘s long-running investment dartboard challenge, in which the performance of stocks picked by professional investors competed against stocks picked by WSJ reporters who threw darts at the newspaper’s stock listings to pick stocks at random. Superficially, it appeared the pros beat the darts, but that was because they benefitted from two secret advantages that were hidden in plain sight:

Professor Burton Malkiel of Princeton University, who for decades has been arguing that you can’t beat the market, and a colleague found that the stocks the experts picked were risky. They were far more volatile than those the reporters picked using darts or the stocks that make up the S&P 500. When the stocks of the three groups are adjusted for risk, the returns of the experts fall precipitously below those of the dartboard or the index.

Professor Malkiel goes further. He argues that the unadjusted returns of the experts were higher because Wall Street Journal readers noted the selections after they were published and then bid them higher. Had the experts chosen their stocks on the day the stock picks were published instead of the day before, their return would fall a whopping 3 percentage points!!!

All in all, Reeves’ goldfish-based investing system is a fun way to revisit those old results.

Previously on Political Calculations

• How Gamestop’s Stock Price Was Squeezed
• Replacing RSA Cryptography
• Ranking the Gurus