BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE CRISIS
THE WINDOW: OCT 9, 2007 TO OCT 8, 2009 · 504 TRADING DAYS
From the October 2007 peak the couch fell 55% before ending at $7,161. 2,214 players have taken this window. 51.4% beat the couch, and only 7.0% did it with certified skill.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, DAY BY DAY, REAL DAILY DATA
October 9, 2007 was the top. What follows is the one every player thinks they would have called: Bear Stearns, Lehman, the TARP vote, a 55% drop to March 9, 2009.
Then look at what October 2008 actually felt like. Down 9.0% on the 15th. Up 11.6% on the 13th, two days earlier. The same week hands you the worst day and the best day, and you had to hold an opinion through both.
The couch ends with $7,161. It did not sell at Lehman because it does not know what Lehman is.
Player figures cover every game whose window started in 2007 or 2008, 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.
51.4% of 2,214 players beat the couch, a coin flip in the most predicted-in-hindsight crash of the century. And 7.0% passed the audit, the second lowest in the archive. Everyone remembers knowing. The ledger says half of them were in the market on March 9, 2009 and the other half missed the 60% that came after it.
Play this exact windowfree, no signup, about two minutes. Same two years, same data, no hindsight.About 55% from the October 2007 peak to the March 9, 2009 bottom in this total-return series. Two years from the peak, a buy-and-hold couch held $7,161 of $10,000.
Only if you also bought back. 51.4% of players beat the couch in windows starting in 2007 and 2008, and only 7.0% did so with a result that passes a statistical skill test.
In total-return terms, roughly four years from the 2007 peak. This window closes in October 2009, with the couch still down and the recovery underway.
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.