We call this the "Crystal Ball" game, because you're going to see how well you can do trading stocks and bonds if you know the news from the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) one day in advance. In other words, you'll be in that dreamed-of position of being a trader who "knows the future." For example, you will be shown the front page of the WSJ for a Wednesday, and be able to take a long or short position in the stock market and in the bond market at prices prevailing at Monday's close (that is, two days earlier), and then the trades will be liquidated at Tuesday's closing prices. Note, on each front page we've blacked-out anything that tells you explicitly what market prices actually did that day - leaving that information in would make this game too easy and no fun at all!

You will be trading the S&P 500 stock market index and a 30-year US Treasury Bond futures contract, and you can use as much leverage as you'd like to, up to 50x leverage. Use the sliders to choose the positions you want and then click the "Trade" button. Remember that for the 30-year Treasury bonds, prices go down when yields go up, and you are trading on price.

Your starting wealth is $1,000,000.

Other things you need to know:

1. We have not chosen these days to try to trick you - they are randomly chosen.
2. You will be able to trade on 15 days, one per year chosen from each of the past 15 years. We've chosen these days randomly from a set of days where one third of them are days of employment reports, one third from days of the Fed announcements, and the other third just randomly, all taken from days that are the in the top half of days ranked by overall market volatility.
3. You can use the "Skip" button to skip any day you don't feel like trading.
4. You can use the "Finish" button if you don't feel like trading all 15 days.
5. 1x leverage means that your position size is equal to your capital size.
6. There are no transaction costs or overnight financing costs or rebates on your trades.

We know this didn't even cross your mind, but we will not be paying anyone for playing this game, or for their results 🙂 For the best experience, play on a PC or Mac rather than on a phone.

Have fun!

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