BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE BUBBLE
THE WINDOW: JAN 4, 1999 TO JAN 2, 2001 · 504 TRADING DAYS
January 1999 to January 2001. The couch gained just +7.0% while the bubble inflated and popped. 75.3% of 1,194 players beat it, the highest win rate in the archive.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, DAY BY DAY, REAL DAILY DATA
You start in January 1999, in the last full year of the mania. Pets.com, sock puppets, companies with no revenue and a valuation the size of a country. The Nasdaq is doing things the S&P 500 only watches.
The couch, holding the index, ends two years later with $10,699. That is +7.0% for two years of the loudest bull market in modern history, because the window catches the top in March 2000 and most of the way down after it.
The line above is a hump. Up, then over, then down, and you are handed a chart shaped exactly like the one every market timer dreams about.
Player figures cover every game whose window started in 1999, 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.
75.3% of 1,194 players beat the couch here, the best human result in the archive. And 15.7% passed the monkey audit, which is above average, so some of this really was reading the shape. This is the honest case for timing: when a window has one enormous obvious hump in it, humans can find it. The problem is that you only know a window has a hump after it is over, and 1995 and 2012 look identical from inside.
Play this exact windowfree, no signup, about two minutes. Same two years, same data, no hindsight.The market peaked in March 2000 and fell for the following two and a half years. A couch buying in January 1999 still ended this window ahead, at $10,699, because the run-up paid for most of the fall.
It is the best case in this dataset. 75.3% of players beat the couch in windows starting in 1999, and 15.7% of them passed a 1,000-monkey skill audit, both the highest figures in the archive.
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.