BEAT THE COUCH · THE ARCHIVE · THE MELT-UP
THE WINDOW: JAN 3, 2012 TO JAN 3, 2014 · 504 TRADING DAYS
A 10% worst drawdown and the couch up +51.8%. Only 5.1% of 1,441 players beat it, one of the worst human results in the archive.
THE COUCH'S $10,000, DAY BY DAY, REAL DAILY DATA
Post-crisis, quantitative easing running, everybody still braced for the next shoe. From January 2012 the market climbs +51.8% over two years and the worst thing that happens to you is a 10% dip.
The worst single day in two years is 2.5%. There is no crash. There is no bottom to buy. There is only a slow, boring, relentless line going up while the commentary insists it cannot last.
The couch turns $10,000 into $15,176.
Player figures cover every game whose window started in 2012, not only the exact hand above, and come from the run export of October 31, 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 thirty windows in this archive players beat the couch 39.2% of the time, because these are the famous years. Across the whole ledger the couch wins 62% of 120,800 games.
5.1% of 1,441 players beat it. The median player finished -15.9% behind. Players in this window donated $3,166,739 in game dollars to the market. Between 1995 and 2012 the archive makes the same point twice, sixteen years apart, in two completely different economies: the windows that punish timing hardest are the ones where nothing frightening happens at all.
Play this exact windowfree, no signup, about two minutes. Same two years, same data, no hindsight.Very. A couch buying in January 2012 and holding two years gained +51.8%, ending with $15,176, with a maximum drawdown of only 10%.
There is no fall to sidestep, so time in cash is pure cost. In windows starting in 2012 only 5.1% of players beat a couch that never traded.
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.
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Not financial advice. The couch is not licensed for anything.