BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE LAST ROAR

Could You Have Timed the Top of the Roaring Twenties?

THE WINDOW: FEB 1, 1928 TO FEB 6, 1930 · 504 TRADING DAYS

February 1928. The bubble still had nineteen months to run, and the crash was inside the window. The couch still ended with $14,267. 53.8% of 1,571 players beat it.

THE COUCH'S $10,000, DAY BY DAY, REAL DAILY DATA

What the couch did

ENDED WITH$14,267 (+42.7%)

WORST DRAWDOWN-44% by Nov 13, 1929

WORST SINGLE DAY-12.9% Oct 28, 1929

BEST SINGLE DAY+12.5% Oct 30, 1929

CASH INSTEAD (T-BILLS)+6.6%

What happened

February 1928. Radio stocks, investment trusts, and margin loans at ten to one. The market had already doubled in a few years and every newspaper had a column explaining why it would keep going. It did keep going. For nineteen more months.

Then September 1929 tops out, October breaks, and the couch rides the whole thing down without blinking: a 44% drawdown by Nov 13, 1929. It never sells. It never buys back. Two years after it sat down it has $14,267 of its $10,000, which is the part of the 1929 story nobody tells: if you got in early enough, the crash only took back some of the party.

This is the window where getting out early and getting out right are the same decision, and where nobody alive at the time could tell which one they were making.

What the players did

GAMES FROM THIS YEAR1,571

BEAT THE COUCH53.8%

CERTIFIED SKILL15.6%

MEDIAN TRADES4

MEDIAN TIME IN MARKET61%

Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1928, not only the exact hand above, and come from the run export of October 31, 2026. A win counts as SKILL only if it beats 90% of 1,000 monkeys replaying the same window with the same trade count and the same time in the market. Across the thirty windows in this archive players beat the couch 39.2% of the time, because these are the famous years. Across the whole ledger the couch wins 62% of 120,800 games.

The read

53.8% of 1,571 players beat the couch, a little better than a coin. Only 15.6% passed the monkey audit. The crash is right there in the middle of the window, the most famous crash in history, and almost half the players still lost to a couch that sat through all of it. Knowing a crash is coming somewhere in two years is worth a lot less than people think.

Play this exact windowfree, no signup, about two minutes. Same two years, same data, no hindsight.

Frequently asked

What if you bought stocks in early 1928 and held through the 1929 crash?

In this game a couch that bought on Feb 1, 1928 and never sold ended two years later with $14,267 of $10,000 (+42.7%), despite a 44% drawdown inside the window.

Did market timers beat buy-and-hold before the 1929 crash?

Barely. In windows starting in 1928, 53.8% of players beat the couch and 15.6% passed the skill audit.

Method: real S&P 500 daily total returns, dividends included, calibrated to Damodaran's annual series; cash earns 3-month T-bills. The same data the game deals. See the evidence page for sources, and the full ledger for the whole ledger.

All thirty windows1929, the crash →

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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.