A stock market game where you don't know what year it is

A historical stock market simulator, played blind

Most investing games hand you today's market and a stack of play money. This one hands you the past with the labels torn off. You might be in the early 1970s with inflation about to take off, or in the late 1990s with internet stocks still climbing. Nobody tells you which.

The point is to recreate the condition every real investor faces: not knowing how the story ends. Everyone "knows" Apple was a buy and Enron a fraud; few knew it at the time. The psychology behind this is covered in our piece on hindsight bias and blind investing.

How a round works, step by step

1. Pick a mode. Free mode allows up to 15 open positions and no crypto. Premium mode removes the position limit and adds crypto.
2. Pick when to start. Choose a start decade (1960s through 2010s) or "random". Random is the fully blind version; with a chosen decade the year is shown on screen and only the company names stay hidden.
3. Get your money. You start with cash and receive a regular monthly income, like a salary you can invest.
4. Watch the clock. Time moves forward a week at a time at one of three speeds, and you can pause or skip ahead a month or a year. Real headlines from the period arrive with the year masked, the deposit line shows the current Fed funds rate, and every asset has a price chart. Now and then a life event lands: a raise, a bonus, an unexpected bill, a spell without a paycheck.
5. Trade. Buy and sell stocks, funds, bonds, commodities or the deposit, all listed under codenames with a sector label. The clock stops while a trade window is open.
6. Repeat for 10, 15 or 20 years. New companies appear when they historically went public. Some you hold may go bankrupt.
7. See the reveal. The real years and names are shown, your result is compared with the S&P 500, your best and worst picks are listed, and you can save a PDF report.

What you see during the round vs what the ending reveals

What is in the catalog

The catalog holds about 290 instruments. About 235 are individual stocks listed in the US, in 12 sector groups from tech and banks to airlines and utilities. Most are American companies; a few are foreign firms with US listings, such as Toyota, Taiwan Semiconductor and Nokia. The rest:

• Funds: 16 index and sector ETFs, such as S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 trackers, small caps, international markets and sector funds. They enter the catalog from 1999 onward.
• Bonds: Treasury funds of several maturities plus corporate and high-yield bond funds. A 7-10 year Treasury line runs back to 1962; before mid-2002 it is modeled from Treasury yields.
• Commodities: gold and silver spot prices, crude oil, and later commodity funds.
• Cash deposit: earns the historical Fed funds rate. Since 1962 its monthly average has ranged from 19.1% in June 1981 to 0.05% in April and May 2020; in August 2026 it was 3.63%.
• Crypto: about 20 coins and tokens, from 2017 onward, in Premium mode only.

The catalog deliberately keeps companies that collapsed: Enron, which filed for bankruptcy in December 2001, Lehman Brothers (September 2008), WorldCom, Blockbuster, Pets.com, Webvan, Washington Mutual and others. Leaving them out would make history look safer than it was, a distortion known as survivorship bias. A stock can go to zero while you hold it.

The menu grows with time, since assets appear only once they historically existed. A round starting in early 1962 opens with about 30 instruments: two dozen blue chips such as IBM, Coca-Cola, General Electric and Exxon, plus Treasuries, oil, gold, silver and the deposit. By January 2000 there are about 140, and by the mid-2010s more than 200.

The 64 years of history behind the game

The S&P 500 closed at 70.96 on January 2, 1962, and at 7,666.49 on October 1, 2026, about 108 times higher, or roughly 7.5% a year before dividends. Over the same span US consumer prices rose about elevenfold. The climb hides rough stretches: the index fell 48% from January 1973 to October 1974, lost 20.5% in a single day on October 19, 1987, and dropped 57% between October 2007 and March 2009.

Where your hidden window falls matters. On month-end closes of the price index (before dividends), 9.3% of all 10-year windows since 1962 ended lower than they started; the worst, February 1999 to February 2009, lost 40.6%. No 15-year window ended lower in nominal terms, but the weakest one, July 1967 to July 1982, gained just 13% while consumer prices nearly tripled. More on those eras in 1970s inflation and the 2008 financial crisis.

How it differs from real-time paper trading

Paper trading simulators use the live market: real tickers, current or slightly delayed quotes, a virtual account. They are good for learning an order screen, but the clock runs at normal speed. A month of practice is a month of real time, whatever happens in it is the only market you see, and you bring everything you already know about the companies.

Classroom stock contests often work the same way: teams trade on live prices for several weeks and are ranked by return at the end. A short contest tends to reward the biggest bet that happened to work, close to the opposite of what long-term investing teaches.

A historical game puts a bear market and the recovery after it into one sitting and takes brand knowledge out of the decision. The trade-off: you are not practicing on today's market.

Who it is for

• Self-learners who want to find out whether they can sit through a 50% drawdown without selling.
• Students of economics, finance or personal finance who need to see inflation, rates and crashes hit their own portfolio.
• Teachers who want a whole class, or a group of friends, to play and compare results: everyone can pick the same start decade and length (each player gets a different window inside it, with dates shown), or everyone plays random rounds and the group compares which eras they drew. There is a separate lesson plan for teachers.

Five tips for your first round

1. Know your benchmark. The score compares you with the S&P 500, dividends reinvested, as if your starting cash, every paycheck and every bonus had gone into the index the day it arrived. Matching it is a respectable result. Index ETFs appear only from 1999 onward; earlier, owning many large companies gets you closer to the index. Why most players fall short is covered in can you beat the S&P 500.
2. Spread your bets. Blind, you cannot tell the future Apple from the future Enron. Spread across many companies and sectors, one bankruptcy dents the portfolio instead of sinking it.
3. Size positions before you buy. Set a ceiling for any single stock, say a tenth of the portfolio. Free mode caps you at 15 open positions, so you will have to choose.
4. Keep some cash. Life events include unexpected bills and months without income. A cushion in cash or the deposit keeps you from selling stocks at a low to pay them.
5. Follow rates and the news. Bonds, gold and the deposit behave very differently from stocks when inflation and the Fed funds rate move fast, and the headlines are your best clue to both.

Honest limitations

• No real money. It is an educational game, not a broker, and nothing in it is investment advice.
• Compressed time. The clock moves a week at a time, so a year passes in a few minutes at the slowest speed. Crashes that unfolded over months go by fast unless you pause.
• Simplified execution. Orders fill in whole shares at the recorded closing price, with a small fee. No bid-ask spreads, no order book, no liquidity problems.
• A frictionless benchmark. The S&P 500 line reinvests every dividend, just as stock and fund prices in the game do, so the comparison is like-for-like. But it pays no trading fees or fund expenses, so it is a slightly higher bar than a real index fund.
• Reconstructed dead companies. Prices of bankrupt and delisted stocks are smoothed reconstructions, so their short-term moves are approximate.
• A US-centered menu. International exposure is limited to a handful of US-listed foreign companies and a few ETFs, almost all of them available only from 2005 onward.

Within those limits, Blindfolio offers what a live simulator cannot: decades of real market history, faced without knowing what comes next.