an infinite number of (purple) monkeys

Richard Dawkins has just completed a wonderful series for Channel 4, entitled 'The Genius Of Charles Darwin'. An odd choice of channel but the programme seems not to have suffered by association with reality television or bogus climate-change documentaries.

In the episode which I just watched, a business analyst poured a small amount of scorn on the idea of the visionary captain of industry, suggesting that if you have a large enough room of people flipping coins, someone will get ten heads in a row and will then try to convince you that his wrist has been optimised for head selecting ability. This is not to say that there is no such thing as a great chief executive, but just that there are probably rather more who coast along by not getting in the way of their staff than those who actively lead by coming up with any decent ideas of their own.

I would like to extend the analogy by asking whether stock market traders (and I include currency, bonds and any other financial nonsense which you care to mention) have any skill whatsoever or whether it is simply a matter of coin tossing. Or, instead of tossing coins, a better analogy here might be the theoretical infinite number of monkeys with typewriters which, given enough time, would type out all the great books (and probably some rank ones as well).

1) If there is any skill to it, the process would have been studied by enough financial institutions that someone would be able to discern a method that worked most of the time. This would show up as one company would hoover up pretty much all the money that there was in the world. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little here and they would probably rein it in a little so as not to arouse too much suspicion. But someone would leak it.

2) Buying or selling in bulk affects the market. If a trader buys enough of anything, the price will go up and then, hey presto, he's a genius because he predicted that the price would go up.

3) Financial institutions have access to more information about companies in which they invest than mere mortals. Yet for some reason, this is not called insider trading. If I telephone members of the board of a major corporation, asking about their future plans and to examine their finances, they would tell me to clear off and mind my own business. Yet if an analyst for a major investment bank were to do the same, they would probably get a different answer. This is, apparently, okay because it is publicly available information - it's just that it's quite difficult for the public to get hold of it without paying the investment bank whose analyst has written down everything the company has told it and, using the genius of knowing that expansion is good, has worked out whether the company is doing well or not.

4) In a big enough sample of traders, someone will have a long-lasting good run. This is to be expected as there are many monkeys hammering away at their trading terminals. However, instead of it being seen as proof of the inevitability of randomness, this 'star-trader' is given more money than a medium-sized town could use on constructing a modest shopping centre and is feted - well, until it all goes pear-shaped and someone else starts doing better.

This is how we base our society. And these ghastly people will tell you that they work so hard and put in such long hours. Yeah, right - they all work four-thousand times harder than a nurse, or a dustman, or a chiropodist and that's why they are paid accordingly...

The industrialists of a bygone era - Salt and Lever and Rockefeller and Getty and their ilk - they may well have personally enriched themselves beyond all reason (obviously Salt and Lever used some of their money philanthropically while for Rockefeller and Getty it fell to the next generation to do the same). However, they employed others in great number. They made stuff with which we built our society. And they risked their own money and, often their own health, in order to do so.

The modern plutocrats are in thrall to the casino of the financial markets. They place money (often other people's) onto the money-go-round and, when the music stops, the snouts go into the trough. Explain to me why someone trading complex financial derivatives with the guy in the bank over there is doing such great things for mankind that he should earn a couple of Bentleys per day, while paying less tax than his cleaner, and I will thank you for improving my understanding of the workings of our society.

I am not holding my breath - but that's mostly because I have a sneaking suspicion that no one is even reading this.