In his 1973 book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Princeton economics professor Burton Malkiel performed an experiment wherein he modeled the performance of a hypothetical stock by charting the results of a random coin flip. If the stock landed on heads, he would chart the stock as moving up a point, but it the result was tails, he would chart the stock as moving down a point. After filling out a chart based on these random results, he would then take this “hypothetical stock” to an investment professional and ask them for their opinion of the future prospects of this stock based on the chart provided.