BEAT THE COUCH · THE OTHER COUCHES · GOLD
THE WHOLE RIDE: AUG 3, 1971 TO DEC 31, 2025 · LOG SCALE
On August 3, 1971 gold cost $42.60 an ounce. Two weeks later President Nixon closed the gold window and gold started to float. A couch that bought $10,000 of it and never sold would have had $1.0 million at the end of 2025, at $4,318.59 an ounce. It would also have sat through a 72% fall and twenty years of nothing.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, EVERY DAY OF THE SERIES. EACH LINE IS TEN TIMES THE ONE BELOW.
Gold is the couch for people who think the other couches are naive. It pays nothing, it does nothing, and it has made a fortune twice: in the 1970s inflation panic, and again from 2019 onwards.
In between, it slept. From the January 1980 top it fell 72%, bottoming on August 25, 1999, and it did not get back to its 1980 price for decades. Its worst two-year window in the pool: -58.6% (from Jan 23, 1980). Its best: +413.2% (from Jan 19, 1978). A brick, in other words, but one that occasionally gets thrown.
Two secret years of real daily gold prices, 504 trading days, the same length and pace as the S&P game. The pool runs from August 1971, the month the dollar came off gold, to the end of 2025. The brick pays no dividends. Cash earns T-bills, as always. 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 Nixon shock | Aug 1971 | Dec 1974 |
| The mid-70s hangover | Jan 1975 | Sep 1976 |
| The inflation panic | Sep 1976 | Jan 1980 |
| The great comedown | Jan 1980 | Feb 1985 |
| The long sleep | Feb 1985 | Feb 1996 |
| The bottom of the long sleep | Feb 1996 | Aug 1999 |
| The commodity awakening | Aug 1999 | Mar 2008 |
| The crisis trade | Mar 2008 | Sep 2011 |
| The taper hangover | Sep 2011 | Dec 2015 |
| The sideways years | Dec 2015 | Jun 2019 |
| The brick's revenge | Jun 2019 | Dec 2025 |
Days the game will tell you about if your window contains them: the 1980 gold panic top (Jan 21, 1980); the bottom of the 20-year bear (Aug 25, 1999); gold's first close above $1,000 (Mar 13, 2008); the 2011 euro-crisis peak (Sep 5, 2011); gold's first close above $2,000 (Aug 6, 2020).
Players beat the gold couch 52% of the time, the best human record of any couch in the building, and 12% of all games passed the monkey audit. The median player finished +0.4% against it. A couch that sleeps for years at a time is the easiest one to beat: cash pays interest, and the brick does not.
From the private gold 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 gold couchfree. Sign in once with Google, then the gold 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 gold on August 3, 1971 at $42.60 an ounce and held to the end of 2025, at $4,318.59, would have had $1.0 million, about 101 times the money.
In the game, yes. Players beat a gold couch that never sells 52% of the time over two-year windows, more than against any other couch. 12% of games passed the skill audit.
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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.