BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE WORST YEAR TO BE CLEVER

Could You Have Beaten 1995? Almost Nobody Has.

THE WINDOW: JAN 3, 1995 TO DEC 30, 1996 · 504 TRADING DAYS

No crash, no panic, a 7% worst drawdown, and the couch up +71.3%. This is the hardest window in the archive: only 3.3% of 945 players beat it.

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

$10,000 START $17,133 Jan 3, 1995 Dec 30, 1996

What the couch did

ENDED WITH$17,133 (+71.3%)
WORST DRAWDOWN-7% by Jul 24, 1996
WORST SINGLE DAY-3.1% Mar 8, 1996
BEST SINGLE DAY+2.0% Dec 19, 1996
CASH INSTEAD (T-BILLS)+11.1%

What happened

Nothing happens here. That is the whole story and that is why it is brutal.

From January 1995 the market simply goes up. The worst single day in two years is 3.1%. The deepest drawdown at any point is 7%, which is a rounding error by the standards of this archive. The couch turns $10,000 into $17,133.

There is no crash to dodge, no panic to be brave in, no moment where sitting in cash pays you back. Every exit is a bill.

What the players did

GAMES FROM THIS YEAR945
BEAT THE COUCH3.3%
CERTIFIED SKILL3.0%
MEDIAN TRADES4
MEDIAN TIME IN MARKET55%

Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1995, 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

3.3%. That is the human win rate in windows starting in 1995, the lowest of any year we have enough games to judge, against an archive average of 33%. The median player finished -17.6% against the couch. Players in this window handed over $2,674,147 in game dollars. Calm bull markets do not punish bad timing more harshly than crashes do. They punish all timing, including the good kind.

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

Frequently asked

What was the best year for buy and hold investors?

In this dataset, windows starting in the mid 1990s. A couch buying in January 1995 gained +71.3% over two years with a worst drawdown of only 7%, and beat 96.7% of the humans who tried to time the same window.

Why is market timing hardest in a bull market?

Because there is nothing to avoid. Every day out of the market is a day of missed gains with no crash to justify it. Only 3.3% of players beat the couch here.

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.