BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE TOP

Could You Have Beaten the Dot-Com Crash?

THE WINDOW: MAR 24, 2000 TO APR 2, 2002 · 504 TRADING DAYS

The window starts on March 24, 2000, the top. Two years later the couch has $7,650 of $10,000. 70.1% of 1,169 players beat it.

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

$10,000 START $7,650 Mar 24, 2000 Apr 2, 2002

What the couch did

ENDED WITH$7,650 (-23.5%)
WORST DRAWDOWN-36% by Sep 21, 2001
WORST SINGLE DAY-5.8% Apr 14, 2000
BEST SINGLE DAY+5.0% Jan 3, 2001
CASH INSTEAD (T-BILLS)+8.7%

What happened

March 24, 2000. The exact peak. From here the market falls for two and a half years, and this window catches the first two of them.

The couch ends with $7,650, down 23.5%, with a worst point of 36%. Cash returned +8.7% and won without getting out of bed.

There is no single dramatic day in this hand. The worst is 5.8%. It is death by a thousand Tuesdays, which is the way most real bear markets actually feel.

What the players did

GAMES FROM THIS YEAR1,169
BEAT THE COUCH70.1%
CERTIFIED SKILL9.8%
MEDIAN TRADES4
MEDIAN TIME IN MARKET82%

Player figures cover every game whose window started in 2000, 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

70.1% of 1,169 players beat the couch, but only 9.8% passed the audit, and 17.6% of players never traded once. Buying the literal top is the nightmare every investor rehearses, and it turns out the nightmare is survivable and boring. The couch is down a quarter and still holding. Two years after this window closes, it is whole again.

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

Frequently asked

What happens if you buy at the top of the market?

In this window, which starts on the March 2000 peak, a couch that buys and holds ends two years later with $7,650 of $10,000. Unpleasant, and recovered in full within a few more years.

Did anyone time the dot-com crash?

70.1% of players beat the couch in windows starting in 2000, but only 9.8% of them cleared the monkey audit that separates a market read from a lucky absence.

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.

← 1999, the bubbleAll ten windows2008, the crisis →

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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.