the monkey method

I am like the monkey that picks winners in the stock market. The difference is that I do it in an online fantasy golf league, which I joined because a friend runs it. Like the monkey, my success is due purely to blind luck. The league is set up so that each week a league member uses “$1 million” (or points) to pick a team comprised of five professional golfers. Based on how these golfers perform in a real-life tournament each week, points are assigned to the teams in the fantasy league. The better your golfer plays, the more points your team gets. The team with the highest number of points is the league’s winner for the week.

So far, my team has performed amazing well through the use of what I will call the monkey method. I will assume that the monkey picking the stocks has no idea what it is actually doing. The monkey just goes down a list of company names and makes random picks. As this occurs, some clever human—representing a TV station, probably—films the monkey’s actions and follows the progress of the stocks. When the stocks perform well, the TV person goes on air and proclaims, “Aha! Even a monkey can pick winners!”

So, I am that monkey, except I do it for the golf league and there is no camera. Every week I go to the league’s website and scroll down the list of golfers’ names, randomly picking five of them until I use up my $1 million. While others in the league may mull over selecting John Smith ahead of Pablo Gonzalez, I don’t do that. Fact is, if there actually were a John Smith or Pablo Gonzalez on the golf tour, I wouldn’t know about them because my interest in golf bottomed out about a decade ago. Others may agonize over picking their teams each week, but my process takes less than a minute.

I am not bragging here, just reporting facts. So far, in a golf season that is probably five weeks old, my team has won a week’s play on two occasions, and my overall point total for those five weeks has placed me in the league’s number 1 spot.

Blind luck? Certainly, because there is no other explanation. The only caveat is that when Tiger Woods is healthy and playing, I usually pick him for my team. Everyone knows of Tiger Woods, of course. Selecting him is akin to putting a banana next to a company’s name on the stock sheet. Even a monkey would make that pick.