Note: This is post #93 in a weekly video series on basic economics.

In his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, economist Burton Malkiel made a controversial claim: a blindfolded monkey, throwing darts at the financial pages, could select a basket of stocks that would do just as well as a set chosen by the pros.

Economist Alex Tabarrok explains why that is true and why the first rule of smart investing is “ignore the expert stock pickers.”

(If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times the speed. You can adjust the speed at which the video plays by clicking on “Settings” (the gear symbol) and changing “Speed” from normal to 1.25, 1.5 or 2.)

Clickhereto see other videos in the Introduction to Economics series.