Monkey Business Gits Wall Street
1.57 p.m. ET (1857 GMT) March 25, 1999
By Mark Egan
LOS ANGELES — Raven Thorogood III makes a pretty good living as an
actor. After playing a pivotal role in a major movie last year he had a little money to play around with, and that is when the Internet first piqued his interest.
So, like many Americans with enough time on their hands to scratch themselves and ponder life's mysteries, Raven, as his pals call him, took the plunge into the stock market.
How difficult could it be? After all, Wall Street suits rake in the greenbacks year after year and the stock market keeps on booming. But Raven was no ordinary day-trading stock picker. In fact he had a few disadvantages, to say the least.
For a start, he knew nothing about the market. Absolutely nothing. On top of that, he is only five years old. And, oh yes, he is a chimpanzee.
But he has friends in high places. One of them, Roland Perry, is editor of the Internet Stock Review. He chose Raven to pick stocks for him and plans to publish an index called MonkeyDex that he predicts will make monkeys of Wall Street's stock pickers.
"This is just entertainment," Perry told Reuters. But not just any old chimp would do, and Raven was clearly a cut above the rest. You might remember his role as the sexy female temptress chimp in last years' movie, "Babe, Pig in the City."
Given his lack of Wall Street guile, Raven made his picks in a way befitting his pedigree — he tossed darts. Many missed the target but 10 hit the dartboard that listed 133 Internet companies, giving him a portfolio of 10 stocks at the start of January that he hoped would make big bananas for him.
His returns over the past two months would leave the average money-manager blushing. All told, his portfolio is up almost 60 percent since the start of the year, with one of his choices soaring more than 330 percent.
By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a good indicator of the market's health, had gained about 7.7 percent by March 22. The tech-laden Nasdaq fared better, with a gain of 9.4 percent. Another tech-heavy index, the Russell 2000, fell about 7 percent over the same period.
"What Raven's performance really shows is the industry's strong performance. I think he's done a lot better than many Internet investment funds," Perry said. The MonkeyDex index will be available in a few weeks at www.monkeydex.com so the Wall Street mavens can learn from Raven's picks, he said.
Perry, who also runs a public relations firm, said the site was not out to make money and he will not push his own clients on the site. "That wouldn't be a good idea."
But Wall Street, where money managers prefer big business to monkey business, is not impressed. The only thing that surprises Bill Meehan, chief market analyst at brokerage company Cantor Fitzgerald of Darien, Connecticut, is that the chimp did not do even better.
"They should have got a smarter monkey. A better monkey would have been up 200 percent," Meehan said. "The average Internet IPO is up something like a couple of hundred percent, which is indicative of the mania we have in the stock market where anything with 'dot com' after its name is golden."
In recent months, stock prices of many fledgling Internet companies have soared as a new breed of day traders have made a mockery of the tried and true investment strategy of choosing stocks after detailed research and number-crunching.
On any given day the biggest stock gainers typically include a bevy of Internet companies whose stocks sometimes rise anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent in one day.
Often they give up a large part of the gains in a few days, but the day-traders' philosophy is to get in and get out quick. With this new investment strategy, holding shares over the weekend is viewed as a long-term commitment.
One particularly bizarre example is Bull & Bear Group Inc. In February the investment firm's shares jumped fivefold in two days, from about $3 to more than $15, as investors bought shares in the belief Bull & Bear was an online brokerage.
Two days later, when they finally read the months-old "news" that Bull & Bear had sold its online operations, its shares were back close to $3.
"It's ludicrous," Meehan said of Internet stock prices in general. "People are treating anything related to the Internet as a certain road to riches and clearly the majority of Internet companies will probably never make any money and go out of business before too long."
Meanwhile, remember the old Wall Street adage: past performance, even by a cross-dressing monkey actor, is no guarantee of future returns. And eat a banana every day. |
