The face-off ran for a year, organised by a British newspaper. On one side: a wealth manager, a stockbroker and a fund manager, armed with decades of combined experience. On the other: a cat named Orlando, who selected companies by flinging his favourite toy mouse onto a grid where each square corresponded to a different stock. Both sides started with the same amount of money.

The professionals studied filings, tracked trends and applied their hard-won expertise. The cat threw a mouse. You already know which detail the headline writers led with.

By year’s end, Orlando’s portfolio had grown more than the experts’ had. He won.

Before anyone reallocates their retirement savings to a cat, the sensible caveats apply: one year is a very short window, and it was a single contest, not a strategy. But the result rhymes with something economists have argued for decades. The late Burton Malkiel famously suggested a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the financial pages could pick a portfolio as well as the professionals — a jab at how hard it is, and how expensive, to reliably beat a simple index.

Which is the genuinely useful takeaway buried under the cat: most actively managed funds, charging real fees, underperform the plain market average over time. Orlando didn’t discover a secret. He just made the point adorable.