Incredible. I bet the results could be improved even further with artificial selection to get spiders that are even better at incorporating carbon into their silk
This article is extremely misleading about the statistics it presents. It claims that you could outperform the funds by investing in random stocks, but the probabilistic model presented in the "source" article (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/your-money/heads-or-tails-...) is a completely different system.
It assumes that every 12 month period, there is a 1/4 chance of being in the top quartile of funds, which is an absurd assumption and also completely unrelated to modeling success of picking random stocks. Sure, there'd be a 1/4 chance of being in the upper quartile of other funds ALSO INVESTING RANDOMLY. But to say you'd have the same chances of beating other actively managed funds makes the assumption that all the other funds are not doing any better than random investment. Big surprise that the conclusion is that funds don't do any better than random investment.