A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage

That’s what I thought this might be before reading the article. Off the top of my head maybe you could signal market movement with a certain stimulus (e.g. a green or red light for up or down market, varying intensity). Of course it wouldn’t work, but if it did the results would be gruesome. Imagine a network of thousands of hamsters plugged into a trading interface to exploit their collective pattern-recognition: the strong traders allowed to feed and reproduce, the weak ones obviously culled. The price of hamster bedding increases 10,000%. Just awful.

And to go even further, breeding the best performing hamsters together and letting evolution take its course

My gut says that random trades have the same expected value as the underlying asset, but increased variance. I'm not a finperson, so learning why this could be wrong would be a learning opportunity.

I wonder if they will give the hamster an opportunity to diversify?

Pretty sure that's the joke

The very first sentence says:

> A hamster in Germany is redefining "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" author Burton Malkiel's belief that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a stock ticker list in the newspaper could do just as good as a human investment professional.

I know it's against the rules to question whether you read the article, but...

In other words, any crypto "investor" who thinks their success is a sign of insight and innovation is in reality no smarter than a random hamster.

that's the whole point! if randomness can give returns higher than most "financial gurus", what do they really know about the market?