The Monkey Index: Can human chart readers beat a monkey?

Five blind charts each day. Human players against 11 seeded random callers. Same tape for everyone.

The scoreboard provides the answer. A monkey making random calls will regularly outperform human chart readers over short runs. Across 36 settled dailies the crowd has taken 26 days and the Monkey 10. This page compares players with a random benchmark on historical charts. It does not compare either side with simply buying and holding the S&P 500.

How the Monkey Index works

Each of the 11 constituents is a seeded random caller. The seed comes from the calendar date, so all 11 make the same calls for every player, and their calls never change once a day settles. The Monkey never sees the five hidden sessions.

The index return on a chart is the equal weight mean of the 11 signed stakes applied to the real five day move. The Monkey always stakes the minimum confidence. Human stakes scale with stated confidence from 55 to 100. Every call trades fixed nominal paper capital with no compounding.

A day goes to the crowd when more than half of the desks that finished all five charts beat the index return. Ties go to the Monkey.

The dollar figure is the running bonus pool. Every settled call moves a desk by its own return minus the index return on that chart, in paper money, so the total is exactly what the field has taken off the Monkey. The ledger below shows each day’s pool move and the running balance.

Limits of the Monkey Index

• Paper money. This is a game score, not an investable return.
• Players self-select and participation varies by day. The dollar total is an aggregate, so it grows with the number of settled calls.
• The Monkey always stakes minimum confidence while humans size up and down, so the score mixes direction reading with stake sizing.
• Alpha is paid on each desk’s session-start bankroll, so a large bankroll moves the pool more than a fresh one on the same calls.
• Charts come from S&P 500 names, which bakes in survivorship and an upward drift. Both sides trade the same tape, so the comparison stays level even though absolute returns skew positive.
• One seeded basket of 11 callers is a reproducible game benchmark, not a statistical control. Ties go to the Monkey.
• The Monkey pays no attention to the market’s upward drift. Most five day windows on these charts ended higher, so a Perma-Bull rule that always calls UP beats the index on most days without reading anything.
• The pool ledger began on Daily #8. Earlier days count toward the record and index return only.

The ledger

Questions about the Monkey Index