Market Pulse
Mixed observation times, Oct 20–Oct 25, 2026 (5 days apart)
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Would you have held?

Every investor thinks they know what they would do in a crash. Six quick questions will tell you what you think you are. Then five real declines — real prices, company and year hidden — will tell you what you actually do.

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Why the company and the year are hidden

Because telling you turns a decision into a memory test. Everybody holds through March 2020 when you say the words “March 2020”. The only version of this question worth asking is the one where you genuinely do not know whether this particular fall is the one that comes back — which is exactly the position you are in every time it happens for real.

Where the falls come from

They are not chosen. A script scans published monthly closing prices for the largest peak-to-trough decline inside each window, puts you in at the peak, and stops you when roughly two-thirds of the fall has happened. Nobody picked the numbers to make any particular answer look clever, and the same rule is applied to every round. The code that does it is scenarios.py, and it prints a warning to itself if holding turns out to be the best answer in every round — because a quiz that always rewards one answer is a sermon with a progress bar.

What the result is not

It is not advice, and it is not a verdict on whether you are a good investor. It is a measurement of one specific thing: the distance between what you say you would do and what you did when you did not know the ending. That gap is worth knowing about yourself, and a game is a much cheaper place to discover it than a real bear market.

Arithmetic on published monthly closing prices. Price return only — dividends are not reinvested, which understates income-paying shares. Past prices are not a forecast of anything. See the financial disclaimer.