BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE GULF WAR
THE WINDOW: OCT 2, 1989 TO SEP 27, 1991 · 504 TRADING DAYS
A Friday-the-13th mini-crash, the invasion of Kuwait, then the biggest day of the war on the first night of bombing. The couch ended with $11,826. 54.4% of 1,562 players beat it.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, DAY BY DAY, REAL DAILY DATA
October 1989. Two weeks into this window, on Friday, October 13, a buyout of United Airlines falls apart and the market drops more than 6% in an afternoon. It recovers. Then in August 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait, oil doubles, and the market falls 19% by Oct 11, 1990.
On January 17, 1991, the night the air war begins, the market does not fall. It has one of its best days in years. The war that everyone was afraid of turned out to be the signal the bottom was already in.
The couch sat through the mini-crash, the invasion and the war, and finished with $11,826, +18.3%.
Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1989, 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.
54.4% of 1,562 players beat the couch, and 16.1% passed the monkey audit. A real crash in the middle of a window gives timers their best odds, and they took some of them. The median player finished +2.0% against the couch. The day that mattered most, the first night of the war, was the day everybody expected the worst.
Play this exact windowfree, no signup, about two minutes. Same two years, same data, no hindsight.It fell 19% from the invasion of Kuwait into October 1990, then rallied hard when the air war began on January 17, 1991. A couch holding from Oct 2, 1989 ended with $11,826.
On October 13, 1989 the market fell more than 6% after a planned buyout of United Airlines collapsed. In windows starting in 1989, 54.4% 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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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.