The random walk theory, in its simplest form, states that stock prices follow no

predictable pattern. A controversial proposition, the theory, when taken to its

extreme, counters the many forms of security analysis—including fundamental
and technical analysis —that purport to positively identify price and risk
trends.

The notion of a "random walk" is a mathematical concept for a variable, in this

case share price, whose future values are unrelated to those past. The idea has
been applied to many financial and nonfinancial phenomena, but in the business
world it is most associated with scholarship on stock prices that began in the
1950s and climaxed in the 1970s.

During that period, a number of academic studies were advanced to describe an

observed randomness in stock prices. Important contributions included Maurice
Kendall's 1953 article "The Analysis of Economic Time Series," published in the
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and the 1964 book The Random
Character of Stock Market Prices by Paul H. Cootner. But the theory's
application to stock market pricing is perhaps best associated with Princeton
economist Burton G. Malkiel's 1973 classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

The theory is seemingly borne out by a casual comparison of how highly managed
mutual funds or other professionally selected stock portfolios regularly
underperform the market as a whole. Consequently, random walk proponents
recommended wide diversification to mirror the entire market's breadth, such as
by choosing stocks based on indexes like the Standard & Poor's 500 or, more
recently, the Wilshire 5000.

The theory is deeply intertwined with the efficient market theory, which holds
that markets are constantly and immediately correcting prices based on new
information. When markets are efficient, the theory posits, no stock is
undervalued or overvalued at a particular moment, and once information
becomes available that a stock may not be priced accurately in relation to the
company's performance or growth prospects, the markets quickly correct that
condition. Both theories were greeted with skepticism early on, but quickly grew
to exert influence on both academics and professionals.

However, even as Malkiel and like-minded analysts continued to carry the

random walk banner in the 1990s, since the 1970s there has been mounting
evidence that stock prices aren't entirely random and markets aren't perfectly
efficient. Large studies on U.S. and international stock data have suggested that
technical price indicators such as moving averages are indeed positively
correlated with accurate predictions of future price movements. Thus, critics of
the random walk theory conclude that studies showing random walk tendencies
were unsophisticated or failed to ask the right questions about price patterns.

Opponents to random walk point out the inefficiencies of the market that make it
possible, as they see it, to anticipate with better than random accuracy what a
stock might do under certain circumstances. These inefficiencies include
incomplete or even conflicting information about companies as well as the
market's propensity to under- and overreact to different types of new
information.

Nonetheless, because many aspects of price movements remain ambiguous, the

general tenets of the random walk theory continue to hold sway with many stock
analysts and economists, and will continue to fuel new research and debate for
the foreseeable future.

FURTHER READING:

Brock, William, Josef Lakonishok, and Blake LeBaron. "Simple Technical Trading
Rules and the Stochastic Properties of Stock Returns." Journal of Finance,
December 1992.

Hulbert, Mark. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." Forbes, 21 October 1996.

Koretz, Gene. "A Less-Than-Random Walk." Business Week, 21 December 1998.

Lo, Andrew W., and Archie Craig MacKinlay. A Non-Random Walk Down Wall
Street. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Musgrave, Gerald L. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." Business Economics,
April 1997.

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