Ten picks from the past. Can you beat the S&P 500?

What Sixty-40 is

Jump to: Why the S&P 500 · What the wheel teaches · How a round works · The numbers · Read more · Questions

Sixty-40 is a free game about the one thing every investor has too much of: hindsight. Everybody knows today that Nvidia was the trade of the century and that Enron, Lehman Brothers and Pets.com went to zero. Very few people knew it at the time. Sixty-40 puts you back in the moment, with only the information an ordinary investor had then, and asks you to choose anyway.

The wheel picks a year between 1990 and 2020 and a kind of asset: US stocks, European and Asian companies, commodities, crypto, houses, country indexes, bonds and cash, collectibles, or pure hype. You see five real positions at roughly the price they traded for at the start of that year. You have ten seconds. Ten picks of $1,000 later, we fast-forward everything to today and show you one number: what your $10,000 became, and whether it beat a plain S&P 500 index fund bought on the same days.

Why the S&P 500 is the bar

Making money over thirty years is not the hard part; markets mostly go up. The hard part is doing better than the laziest possible alternative. For most people that alternative is a low-cost index fund that owns the 500 largest American companies and is never touched. Warren Buffett has recommended exactly that for ordinary savers for decades, and famously won a ten-year bet that such a fund would beat a hand-picked group of hedge funds. That is why every Sixty-40 result is shown next to the same money in the S&P 500, and why the colour of each pick depends on it: green beat the index, yellow made money but trailed it, red lost money, and a skull means the position went to zero.

What the wheel teaches

Play a few rounds and patterns appear that no textbook can make you feel as quickly:

• Most stocks do not beat the index. A small number of extraordinary winners drive the market's long-run return. Picking among five names at random, you will usually miss them.
• The famous names are a biased sample. The catalogue deliberately includes the companies, coins and funds that disappeared. A game without them would teach survivorship bias instead of investing.
• Timing changes everything. The same company can be a ten-bagger from one starting year and a loss from another. Cisco in 1995 and Cisco in 2000 are different investments.
• Hype has a half-life. Meme stocks, SPAC darlings and celebrity coins look unstoppable on the day you see them. The wheel shows you what happened next.
• Boring compounds. Index funds, consumer staples and dull industrials rarely make the highlight reel, and frequently win.

How a round works

Tap the wheel or the big button to spin. When it lands, five positions appear with their price in that year. Tap one before the timer runs out; hesitate and that $1,000 stays in cash, earning nothing. After ten picks, press Simulate to today. Your result is ranked against thousands of simulated ways the same game could have gone, which gives you a percentile and a title, from Rekt to Oracle. You can then share an emoji card of your result without spoiling the answers, challenge a friend to the exact same spins, or download a full report of every pick.

The Daily gives everyone in the world the same ten spins once a day, so you can compare honestly. Free play spins a fresh wheel every time and remembers which positions you have already met, so you keep discovering new ones.

Where the numbers come from

Prices are approximate start-of-year values, adjusted for stock splits and excluding dividends, compiled from public historical sources. Houses, commodities and collectibles use widely reported reference prices. Because dividends are left out, steady dividend payers look a little worse than they really were, and so does the index. Treat every figure as illustrative: Sixty-40 is a game about judgement, not a data terminal, and nothing on this site is investment advice.

Read more

Every position on the wheel has its own page with the full story and the hindsight numbers from each starting year. A few to start with:

• What if you bought Nvidia? The chip maker that went sideways for years before anyone said "AI".
• What if you bought Enron? America's most admired company, right until it wasn't.
• What if you bought Bitcoin? Every crash it survived, in one table.
• What if you bought a Rolex Daytona? When a watch beats the market, and when it doesn't.
• All 258 positions, sorted by asset class.

The Lessons section goes deeper into the ideas behind the game, from Buffett's million-dollar bet to survivorship bias and why every crash looks obvious afterwards. The Ledger collects thirty rules from Buffett, Munger, Bogle and a few famous bears, each one illustrated by a position from the wheel.

Questions people ask

Is Sixty-40 free?

Yes. There is no account, no sign-up and no real money involved. The site is paid for by advertising.

Can I use this to choose real investments?

No. Sixty-40 looks backwards on purpose. It is a way to experience how hard picking winners is, not a tool for picking them.

Why only ten seconds a pick?

Because real decisions are made with incomplete information and limited attention. With unlimited time you would simply look up what happened next; the clock keeps the game honest.

What does the name mean?

Sixty-forty is the classic split between stocks and bonds in a balanced portfolio: sensible, unglamorous and very hard to beat. Which is more or less the point of the game.