BEAT THE COUCH · THE OTHER COUCHES · APPLE
THE WHOLE RIDE: DEC 15, 1980 TO DEC 31, 2025 · LOG SCALE
Apple went public on December 12, 1980. A couch that put $10,000 into the stock on December 15, 1980 and never sold would have had $26.6 million at the end of 2025, 2,663 times its money. It would also have watched it fall 82% on the way, when the company nearly died.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, EVERY DAY OF THE SERIES. EACH LINE IS TEN TIMES THE ONE BELOW.
One stock is the riskiest couch in the building, and this one happens to be the most famous winner in market history. That is the trap. Every story about Apple is told from the end of the chart.
From inside, it looked like this: a fall of 82% to December 23, 1997, a company said to be about ninety days from running out of cash, and years when the smart money said it was finished. Its worst one-year window in the pool: -75.2% (from Sep 21, 2000). Its best: +382.7% (from Jun 9, 1982).
One secret year of real daily Apple share prices, 252 trading days, split and dividend adjusted. Rounds run half the length of the S&P game at the same pace. The pool runs from December 1980, the month of the IPO, to the end of 2025. This is the stock, not the company's opinion of the game: the crest is a piece of fruit. The couch buys on the first tick and never sells. One button: BUY or SELL. If you never touch it you match the couch exactly and the stamp says ENLIGHTENED. Beat it and 1,000 monkeys replay your round with the same number of trades on random days; beat 90% of them and the win is stamped SKILL. Otherwise LUCK.
| Era | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| The garage-money years | Dec 1980 | Jan 1983 |
| The Lisa flop and the Mac gamble | Jan 1983 | Jun 1985 |
| The Sculley years | Jun 1985 | Jun 1993 |
| The near-death era | Jun 1993 | Aug 1997 |
| The second coming | Aug 1997 | Oct 2001 |
| The iPod years | Oct 2001 | Jan 2007 |
| The iPhone revolution | Jan 2007 | Aug 2011 |
| The Cook transition | Aug 2011 | Jul 2015 |
| The road to a trillion | Jul 2015 | Dec 2019 |
| The everything company | Dec 2019 | Dec 2025 |
Days the game will tell you about if your window contains them: the day Microsoft bailed out Apple (Aug 6, 1997); the profit-warning massacre of 2000 (Sep 29, 2000); the day the iPhone was announced (Jan 9, 2007); the first $1 trillion close (Aug 2, 2018).
Players beat the Apple couch 38% of the time, and 12% of all games passed the monkey audit. The median player finished -1.7% against it. One year is short, one stock is violent, and the long-run line goes up so steeply that most exits are expensive. The couch did not pick Apple because it was smart. It picked one stock and never sold, which is the part that worked.
From the private apple ledger, kept apart from the public S&P count by design. Percentages only. Across the whole public ledger the S&P couch wins 62% of 120,800 games.
Play the apple couchfree. Sign in once with Google, then the apple couch is on the floor with the others.Or play the original S&P couch, no sign-in.
A couch that bought $10,000 of Apple on December 15, 1980, days after the IPO, and held to the end of 2025 would have had $26.6 million (split and dividend adjusted), about 2,663 times the money.
Many times. The deepest fall in the series is 82%, bottoming on December 23, 1997. In the game, players beat a buy-and-hold Apple couch 38% of the time over one-year windows.
Beat the Couch is not affiliated with Apple Inc. The game uses public historical share prices.
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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.