Hello,

I made beatthecouch.com in July and it’s basically a game where you try to beat the S&P 500 and buy/sell when you want. Your opponent is a couch. It buys on day one and never sells.

Now over 100K+ games later, the hypothesis stands: it’s not wise to try to trade and time the market. Here’s the original data from the actual games itself.

Source: the game’s own database, every completed game Jul 12 to Aug 28. Tool: Python and matplotlib. Market data: S&P 500 daily total returns 1928 to 2019.

thanks!

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    8 days ago

    A “near” century that conspicuously omits the Roaring Twenties leading into the worst market crash in history and the COVID crash at the end.

    As a counterexample, if you consider the Nikkie’s historical run - from it’s inception in 1950 to the 2019 benchmarks, the slog from the 1989 downturn to 2019 produces a negative ROI, about −1.65% annualized in yen. The Nikkei closed 1989 at 38,915.87 and 2019 at 23,656.62.

    Any Beat the Couch gambit during this period rewards people for staying in cash.

    Of course… since 2019, the Nikkei has seen a whooping 17% annualized return, skyrocketing to 66,405.56

    The S&P, by comparison, only grew 13% annually.

    So if you’re playing “Beat the Couch” with the Nikkei as an option, you can win by holding that over the S&P.

    But the real TL;DR; of it is that past performance isn’t an indication of future success. You can’t invest in the historical market. You have to play the market that exists today, without knowing in advance what the future return will be.