BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE GREAT CRASH

Could You Have Beaten the 1929 Crash?

THE WINDOW: SEP 3, 1929 TO SEP 4, 1931 · 504 TRADING DAYS

September 3, 1929 was the top. Two years later the buy-and-hold couch had $4,614 left of $10,000. 1,108 players have taken this window. 72.4% beat the couch, the best human showing in the archive.

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

What the couch did

ENDED WITH$4,614 (-53.9%)

WORST DRAWDOWN-58% by Jun 2, 1931

WORST SINGLE DAY-12.9% Oct 28, 1929

BEST SINGLE DAY+12.5% Oct 30, 1929

CASH INSTEAD (T-BILLS)+7.3%

What happened

You start on the exact day the party ended. September 3, 1929 was the peak of the Roaring Twenties bull market, and nobody standing there knew it. Six weeks later came Black Thursday, then Black Monday, then Black Tuesday. The couch bought at the top and never sold, because that is the only thing a couch knows how to do.

Two years later it had $4,614 left of its $10,000. Down 58% at the worst point. On October 28, 1929 the market lost 12.9% in a single day, and then gained 12.5% two days later, which tells you everything about why getting out and back in is harder than it sounds.

This is the one window in the archive where doing nothing is a documented disaster. Cash earned +7.3% and beat the couch without trying.

What the players did

GAMES FROM THIS YEAR1,108

BEAT THE COUCH72.4%

CERTIFIED SKILL16.0%

MEDIAN TRADES4

MEDIAN TIME IN MARKET81%

Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1929, not only the exact hand above, and come from the run export of August 28, 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 ten windows in this archive players beat the couch 48.6% of the time, because these are the famous years. Across the whole ledger the couch wins 62% of 120,800 games.

The read

So humans win here, and they win big: 72.4% of 1,108 games. It is also the least impressive win in the archive. Beating a couch that lost half your money means you ended down 40% instead of down 54%. Only 16.0% of players cleared the monkey audit even so, which means most of the winners were not timing the crash. They were just out of the market while it happened, for reasons no better than a coin.

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

Frequently asked

Was 1929 the worst two years in stock market history?

For a buy-and-hold investor starting at the September 1929 peak, close to it. The couch ends this window at $4,614 from $10,000, with a worst-point drawdown of 58%. The 1929 to 1932 stretch as a whole was worse still; this window stops in September 1931, before the final leg down.

Could market timing have saved you in 1929?

In the game, 72.4% of players beat the couch in windows starting in 1929, the highest rate we record. But only 16.0% of all players in this window passed the skill audit, so most of those wins were indistinguishable from being randomly absent.

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 ten windows1932, the bottom →

BEAT THE COUCH · the game · the archive · the evidence · the data · Privacy · Terms

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