Cat Takes on Experts in Investment Challenge

You ever feel like playing the stock market is like spinning a roulette wheel?  Even the financial experts get thrown for a loop from time to time when unpredictable events happen that effect the market change things.

So how good are financial experts when it comes to picking good investments?  This is what Britain's The Observer wanted to find out when they came up with a year-long investment challenge between seasoned stock market professionals and a common household cat. The results are in following three financial professionals and a cat named Orlando who were allowed to invest $8046 in any five companies.

The professionals of course relied on their wealth of investment knowledge and traditional stock-picking methods to make their stock choices.

I know what you're thinking: "How can a cat possibly choose stock?"

The cat selected chose his stocks by throwing his favorite toy mouse on a grid of numbers allocated to different companies. The rules of the challenge allowed the teams to switch stocks around each quarter if they wanted to.

By the end of the third quarter, the professionals earned a profit of $799 and the cat earned $469. That trend changed in the fourth-quarter suddenly as the market value of the professionals' stocks declined while the cat's stock gained significant value, upsetting the apple cart of the Pro's.

When all was said and done, the cat made a $872 profit; the professionals, just $283.

What's the moral of this story?  Well, you could get yourself a cat and have it pick your investments or just do what most what my financial planner told me to do: diversify your investments.

The theory being of course that when some stocks are performing poorly, your other investments are doing well.  The idea is that it all evens out in the end.  If you want advice on investing you can check out www.usa.gov.