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!

Because an exact tie means you could effectively also be the couch. In which case, a couch won, whether it was you or the couch.
Oh. Thanks for explaining that!
It’s not an official explanation, but that’s how I think of it, based on how statistical significance works in research.