BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE NIFTY FIFTY

Could You Have Beaten the Nifty Fifty Market?

THE WINDOW: JAN 4, 1971 TO DEC 29, 1972 · 504 TRADING DAYS

One-decision stocks, the Nixon shock, and a calm climb to the 1973 top. The couch turned $10,000 into $13,565. 40.5% of 1,502 players beat it.

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

What the couch did

ENDED WITH$13,565 (+35.6%)

WORST DRAWDOWN-12% by Nov 23, 1971

WORST SINGLE DAY-1.5% Jun 18, 1971

BEST SINGLE DAY+3.2% Aug 16, 1971

CASH INSTEAD (T-BILLS)+8.6%

What happened

January 1971. Fifty blue chips, Polaroid, Xerox, Avon, Disney, are so good that the advice is to buy them at any price and never sell. The "one-decision stocks". Fund managers pay fifty and eighty times earnings for them and sleep fine.

On August 15, 1971 President Nixon closes the gold window and freezes wages and prices. The next trading day the market jumps. Two years after it sat down the couch has $13,565, up +35.6%, with a worst drawdown of only 12%.

The top came in January 1973, right after this window closes. Everything in this hand looks like the beginning of something. It was the end.

What the players did

GAMES FROM THIS YEAR1,502

BEAT THE COUCH40.5%

CERTIFIED SKILL17.2%

MEDIAN TRADES4

MEDIAN TIME IN MARKET58%

Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1971, 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

40.5% of 1,502 players beat the couch, and 17.2% passed the monkey audit, one of the better skill rates in the archive. A market that rises in fits and starts, with a policy shock in the middle, gives a careful trader some real openings. Most players still lost, and the median one finished +0.0% against the couch.

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

Frequently asked

What were the Nifty Fifty stocks?

A group of large US growth stocks in the early 1970s considered safe to buy at any price. A couch holding the whole market from Jan 4, 1971 turned $10,000 into $13,565 over two years.

What was the Nixon shock?

On August 15, 1971 the US ended dollar convertibility into gold and froze wages and prices. The market rose sharply the next trading day. In windows starting in 1971, 40.5% of players beat buy-and-hold.

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.

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