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!

  • Happy Cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    55·
    3 days ago

    Insider trading is definitely frequently used to unfairly beat the market but in your friends defense, there is a difference between knowledge of current world and market conditions and insider trading.

    • blitzen@lemmy.caEnglish
      22·
      3 days ago

      Current world and market conditions (non-insider trading) are baked into the prices already.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Someone is able to profit off of it, but you have to be far faster than any of us could ever hope to be. There’s a lot of money spent on trying to shave nanoseconds off of trading times for this reason. Unless you’re working for one of these companies with access, you can’t beat them, and the conditions have already been baked in.

      • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Are they? When most of the money going into the market is through blind index fund investing, any assumption that stocks are rationally priced seems completely unjustified.