(MONEY Magazine) – Are professional money managers definitely smarter than monkeys? You might think so upon learning that the Wall Street Journal recently ended its long-running "Investment Dartboard" feature, in which money managers engaged in stock-picking contests against portfolios created by throwing darts at a randomly arranged list of stocks.

The column was created in 1988 as a tongue-in-cheek test of efficient-market theory as expounded by Burton Malkiel in his 1973 classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Malkiel wrote that because stock prices reflect all known information, short-term fluctuations are random and therefore unpredictable. Thus a "blindfolded monkey throwing darts" could theoretically pick stocks as well as financial professionals.

The darts did occasionally win the six-month contests (in which reporters, not monkeys, threw darts). But overall the pros won by 6.7 percentage points--casting efficient-market theory in a bad light. "I think Malkiel's theory is open to question," says Lawrence Ingrassia, who edited the column.

Malkiel himself begs to differ. The 70-year-old Princeton economist, who refuted the contest's earlier results in a 1994 study, insists the Journal's findings were "not inconsistent" with his theory. The four stocks chosen per contest weren't nearly enough to simulate an efficient market, he says. And the "publicity effect" of being chosen by the pros goosed their picks by 4% to 5%. So Malkiel (who gamely threw the first dart and returned to celebrate the contest's 10th anniversary) is sticking with the monkeys: "I still think the evidence is overwhelmingly favorable for my theory."

--CYBELE WEISSER