I made a website with Claude where you try to time the market and beat a couch. 100K+ plays later, the couch still wins 62%
Heat trend
Collecting trend data
The percentage is based on available heat signal, not comment count or independent people.
A developer created beatthecouch.com, a website game where players attempt to time the market by buying and selling S&P 500 stocks over two secret years, starting with $10,000. The opponent is a "couch" that simply buys on day one and never sells. After over 100,000 plays, the couch still wins 62% of the time. Players must beat 90% of 1,000 randomly replayed trades to avoid a "Lucky" stamp on their win.
The game. beatthecouch.com - $10,000, two secret years of real S&P 500 history, one buy / sell button. Your opponent is a couch. It buys on day one and never sells. After each game, 1,000 monkeys replay your trade count on random days. Beat 90% of them or your win is stamped Lucky.
The data. 100,278 games (at the time of the graph - now around 107K, still similar). The couch won 62%. Humans only seem to beat the couch when the market crashed in their window.
What Claude did. The data pipeline (S&P closes 1928 to 2025, dividends, T-bills etc). The whole game as one HTML file and the Cloudflare backend. And also the reddit app port at reddit.com/r/beatthecouch