$10,000. Two secret years of real market history.
One button: BUY (ride it) or SELL (hide). Every click costs 1%.
Your opponent — the Desk — is buy & hold. Beat it. ?
The markets. Stocks: daily S&P 500 total returns (price + reinvested dividends), January 1928 → present — 24,700+ trading days, extended past 2019 with the S&P 500 Total Return index. Crypto: daily BTC/USD closes, August 2011 → present. Each game deals a uniformly random two-year window.
The tilt report. Trade enough in a run and we grade what the pain made you do: exits within 3 days of a sharp drop, re-entries within 3 days of an exit, and how much faster you clicked while losing. A+ goes to people the market couldn't rattle.
Leverage. Optional 1×, 2× or 4×, set from the trading screen — even mid-position. Buying in at 4× puts your equity against a loan of three times more; the position rides the market while the loan accrues the T-bill rate, and your equity is what's left after paying it back. Fall to 5% of the equity you entered the position with and you're margin-called: position closed, you ride out the window in cash. The Desk never uses leverage. It doesn't need to.
The leaderboard. Ranked by your average result against the Desk — dollars off it per session, averaged over every session you play. Wins and losses both count; sessions minimum, so one lucky hand proves nothing. Display name public, email private. Top 10 hang in the lobby.
The Desk. The Desk is just buy & hold: $10,000 into one position on day one, then lunch. It does not watch the chart. It does not have feelings about wicks. It wins anyway, which is the entire point.
Cash. While you're out, your money earns the historical 3-month T-bill rate for those exact dates. Hiding pays a little. It rarely pays enough.
The monkey audit. Beating the Desk once is easy to fluke. Every win is replayed by 1,000 monkeys using your exact schedule — same number of exits, same out-of-market block lengths — at random dates in your window. Clear the 90th percentile or your win is stamped LUCKY.
Part II. The game is a simulation; the audit isn't. Arlo runs the same statistics on your real trades — monkey percentile, you-vs-doing-nothing, hold-time asymmetry, fee drag, tilt profile — and issues the full assessment, free. Arlo is coming soon; signing the leaderboard joins the waitlist.
Costs. Every execution — each buy and each sell — pays 1% of your equity in slippage and commission, so a round trip costs about 2%. Deliberately steeper than a real retail fill: the point is that activity is never free. Your opening buy during the countdown is free, and so is the Desk's, which is why buying in at the bell and never touching the button again finishes exactly level with it. A forced liquidation pays the same 1%. The monkey percentile is measured before costs, since the monkeys run your trade count and would pay the identical drag.
Known limitations. No taxes in the game, and real spreads widen exactly when you most want out. Survivorship bias is doing the Desk a favor. The dataset and the daily window are visible in the page source; you can cheat, if beating a lunch break matters that much to you.
Lineage. The format owes a quiet nod to beatthecouch.com, where the original opponent was a couch. Ours went corporate.