cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49878453
Solo project I’ve been building this month, wanted to share here. The rules:
You get $10,000 and two secret years of real S&P 500 history, drawn from 1928 to 2019 (daily data, dividends included; your cash earns T-bill rates while you hide). One button: BUY or SELL. Your opponent is a couch. It buys at the start and never moves.
Every finished game is audited by 1,000 monkeys. It’s a permutation test 1,000 replays with your same time in the market and same number of trades, on random days. Beat 90% of the monkeys and your win is stamped TIMED THE MARKET. Anything less is stamped LUCKY, in red ink, on your settlement document.
About 84,000 games have been played so far. The couch has won 63% of them. Roughly 1 game in 9 ends in a win that survives the monkey audit.
There’s also a daily hand, same secret window for everyone, streaks, and a public ledger of humanity vs the couch.
If you have time, I’d love feedback, and I will answer any methodology questions, thanks!
Is your point here that holding assets over a long period of time always pays off more than selling high and buying low?
There is really no strategy to this, I just waited it out and the highest point was at the end, as was to be expected, never mind compounded interest over recurring investments or portfolio diversification.
Also I don’t understand why the other player is a couch?
at the core it, it’s a fun little game and not much more a lot of people do “chart reading” to predict the market and this kind of pokes fun at that
the idea is trying to time the market (whether buying or selling) is very hard and the s&p500 usually wins over the mid-to-long run
and the other playing a couch is just to show how little of an effort it takes to make more money than trading - an inanimate object in an index fund can outperform you.
I think you should spend a few more sentences selling the couch to players: “It doesn’t buy. It doesn’t sell. It just holds on to the stocks it already has.”
Or something like that.