In famous congressional testimony in 1967, the great economist Paul Samuelson delivered his verdict on the money-management industry. Citing a recent dissertation by a PhD candidate at Yale, he suggested that randomly chosen stock portfolios tended to beat professionally managed mutual funds. When the House banking committee chairman sounded incredulous, the professor stood his ground. “When I say ‘random,’ I want you to think of dice or think of random numbers or a dart,” he emphasized.
