A group of cows matched a team of professional stock market analysts in a test to see whose picks could generate the best returns on the Norwegian stock market.

The experiment was conducted on the Norwegian television program Økonomiekspertene, which set out to investigate just how much benefit there was in expert investing advice.

The producers picked two Norwegian stock analysts, an astrologist, a pair of beauty bloggers, and a group of five cows.

The Norwegian television program Økonomiekspertene ran a three-month experiment tracking the stock picks of expert stockbrokers, beauty bloggers, an astrologer, and a group of four cows

Each group was given the equivalent of $1,222 (or 10,000 crowns), and were allowed to choose any number of stocks from the OBX index, which tracks the top 25 companies on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

The investments were held for three months and then sold off to see who had brought in the biggest return on their investment, according to a report in The Financial Times.

Since the cows couldn't actually make selections, they were led onto a grass field with a five-by-five grid showing the 25 different companies.

When the cows defecated on a particular grid square, the team recorded the company painted in it as an official pick.

The cow’s picks were the engineering firm Aker Solutions, the state energy company Statoil, the private energy company Fred Olsen Energy, and Schibsted, a digital publishing company.

While other teams were allowed to invest different amounts of money into different companies to get better returns, the cows’ money was divided evenly between their four ‘selections.’

The cows' stock 'picks' were determined by marking which company their defecation landed next to

The expert stock brokers (left) outperformed a Norwegian stock index by 2.8 percent, the astrologer (center) came in slightly below the stock indexes returns, and the beauty bloggers came out ahead of everybody, more than 5 percent ahead of the index.

The cows basically did as well as the stock brokers and outperformed the Oslo stock index by 2.6 percent over three months

The astrologer made his selections based around the fact that it was the year of the goat in the Chinese calendar, while the beauty bloggers said they didn’t recognize any of the company names on the list.

Instead, they picked based on how well they liked the sound of the company name, settling on the seafood company Marine Harvest and the cruise line Royal Caribbean.

At the end of the three month period, three of the four groups had outperformed the five percent return from OBX index.

The beauty bloggers performed best with a 10 percent return, while the stockbrokers and the cows got basically the same results, with a 7.26 percent return and a 7.28 return respectively.

The astrologer was the only participant who underperformed the OBX, with a sub-five percent return.