The $100,000 experiment
What people do with $100,000 of fake money
Our stock market game gives every new player $100,000 that isn't real, and no rules about what to do with it. So far 4.9 million accounts have made 65 million trades. This is a close look at a random sample of them: 62,000 players and the 800,000 trades they made.
4.9 million accounts65 million trades800,000 analysed here
Bitcoin▲ up20x10 hours−$472
NEO▲ up20x1 sec+$86
XRP▲ up20x37 sec+$43Bitcoin▲ up100x3 sec−$80
Platinum▲ up20x47 days−$15,263
USD/CHF▲ up20x44 days+$1,857Netflix▼ down2 days+$387NEO▲ up20x2 min+$170
Platinum▼ down100x4 days+$6,244Platinum▲ up20x21 hours−$4,682Bitcoin▼ down20x28 sec−$134Natural gas▼ down20x71 sec−$18
Crude oil▼ down100x4 days+$25,284
Crude oil▲ up100x9 days+$9,269
XRP▲ up20x15 sec+$12Litecoin▲ up20x65 sec+$137Bitcoin▲ up100x45 hours−$292Copper▲ up20x4 days+$3,699FR40▲ up20x53 min+$255Gold▲ up20x92 days−$10,003Crude oil▲ up20x16 sec+$54Bitcoin▲ up100x7 sec+$21
Ethereum▲ up20x5 min−$11Bitcoin▼ down5x5 days+$26Apple▼ down100x15 sec+$15Amazon▲ up100x5 days+$15,926Brent oil▲ up20x39 sec+$32
Ethereum▲ up76 min+$10XRP▲ up12 hours+$8Dow Jones▲ up100x2 days+$461USD/CAD▲ up6 days+$8XRP▼ down100x47 days+$101,944Tilray▲ up20x2 hours−$7Litecoin▲ up100x69 min+$174Gold▼ down20x65 sec+$115GBP/JPY▼ down100x3 days+$7,591Bitcoin▲ up100x52 min+$945Tesla▼ down20x2 min+$11FTSE 100▲ up20x15 hours+$46Bitcoin▲ up20x27 sec+$36Qtum▼ down100x4 min+$711GOOG▲ up20x3 days+$1,912Crude oil▲ up20x18 min−$23Litecoin▼ down20x4 min−$40
Stellar▲ up20x2 hours+$25Bitcoin▲ up100x2 hours+$4,723Gold▼ down100x60 sec−$154AUD/USD▲ up6 days+$102Bitcoin▲ up20x51 sec−$25Bitcoin▲ up20x8 min+$177XRP▲ up20x18 sec−$46Nasdaq 100▲ up100x32 hours+$14,763AAL▲ up14 days+$546Stellar▲ up20x7 sec+$50Nasdaq 100▼ down100x4 min+$84Bitcoin▲ up20x9 min−$283Apple▼ down10x9 days+$17SNAP▲ up100x54 days+$137,206Bitcoin▲ up100x28 sec−$198Bitcoin▼ down100x89 sec−$190The first move
Almost half of all first trades are Bitcoin
Hand a hundred people $100,000 and 47 of them buy Bitcoin before anything else. Apple, the most popular share, is the first pick of 9. The opening move is rarely a careful one.
1 in 8first trades is placed at 100x, the highest leverage the game allows
A hundred first trades
Bitcoin first, by a distance. Apple is the most popular share. Each dot is one real first trade, chosen so that the hundred match all 38,000 in the sample. Tap or point at a dot to see it.
Speed
Three trades in ten are over within a minute
Only 8% of trades are held for more than a week. With nothing real to lose, most people don't invest. They click.
The trades that were left alone did better. A trade closed within a minute ended in profit 57% of the time. One held for between a day and a week: 74%.
7 minis how long the middle trade lasts before it is closed
How long a trade was held, and how often it won
Point at or tap a column to read it. Prices mostly rose over these years, which favours anyone who waited.
Leverage
Three trades in four are made with borrowed money
Leverage means trading with more money than you put in. At 20x, a 1% move in the price changes your stake by 20%, in either direction. Only 25% of trades go without it, and the most common setting is 20x.
Leverage does not make trades win more often so much as it makes them end further from where they started. At 100x, a third of trades gained half the stake or more, and one in ten lost nearly all of it.
100xis the setting on 16% of all trades. A 1% move the wrong way takes the whole stake.
How 100 trades ended, by leverage
16% of all trades use 100x.
- Lost nearly all of the stake11
- Lost some20
- Gained some36
- Gained half the stake or more33
100 squares for every 100 trades made at this leverage. Drag the slider to change it. The game never closes a losing trade for you, so high leverage looks kinder here than it would at a real broker.
Betting on falls
A third of Bitcoin bets are on a fall, whatever the price does
Players can bet that a price will drop as easily as that it will rise. Bitcoin went from $16,966 to a peak of $122,569 over these years, and through all of it roughly 32 in every 100 Bitcoin trades kept betting it would fall.
1 in 4trades is a bet that the price will drop
Bitcoin, week by week
Move or drag across the chart to read any week. 196 weeks, 184,401 Bitcoin trades.
In markets that mostly rose, that was the expensive habit. Among players with five or more trades, those who almost never bet on falls are far more likely to be ahead.
Players in profit, by how often they bet on falls
Forgotten trades
One trade in ten was never closed. Those did best of all.
People bought something, wandered off and never came back.
It is the oldest finding in investing, rediscovered by accident: the people who did nothing beat the people who kept busy.
72%of the trades still open were opened more than a year ago
What $10,000 turned into
Ordinary purchases with no leverage: 30,345 that were never closed, valued at today's prices after years in which most markets rose. The thin line marks the $10,000 put in.
Winners
Two players in three are ahead. Almost all of the profit belongs to a few.
67% of the players who traded have more than the $100,000 they started with. But add up everyone's profit and it is anything but evenly spread.
43%of all the profit is held by the top 1% of players
Who holds the profit
Drag to widen the group. 67% of players who traded are in profit at all.
Practice shows. Among players who made a single trade, 55% are ahead. Among those with a hundred or more, 82%.
Players in profit, by number of trades made
Build a trade
Pick a style. See how the real ones went.
Fill in an order the way you would place it. Beside it is what happened to every trade in the sample that was made the same way.
16,151 real trades in the sample were made this way.
The middle trade returned +35.4% of the money put in.
Countries
Where you are from matters less than you would think
People in very different places trade in strikingly similar ways, with a few local habits. These are the 17 countries with the most players in the sample. Pick one to see where it sits.
Each dot is a country; the large one is United States. The tick marks the middle country.
Your turn. Here is $100,000.
It isn't real, so finding out what kind of trader you are costs nothing.
How to read this
- The money is not real
- People take risks with play money that they would not take with their savings. Read this as a study of instinct, not of investing skill.
- The sample
- The game has about 4.9 million accounts and 65 million trades. This page uses a random sample of 62,004 players and all 803,292 trades they made between September 2021 and October 2026. 38,184 of them placed at least one trade.
- The countries
- The sample is limited to 58 Western and other high-income countries, so that the players are broadly comparable. Other countries may behave differently.
- Markets rose
- Shares, gold and crypto all climbed strongly over these years, which flatters anyone who bought and held, and punishes anyone who bet on falls.
- No forced selling
- The game never closes a losing position for you. A real broker would close a leveraged trade once the stake is gone, so real results at high leverage would be harsher than these.
- Open trades
- Trades that were never closed are valued at prices from early October 2026, with any loss capped at the amount staked.
- Not advice
- Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
The numbers behind the charts
| Asset | Share |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 46.9% |
| Apple | 8.7% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 5.1% |
| Gold | 4.5% |
| Crude oil | 4.2% |
| XRP | 3.7% |
| Ethereum | 3.7% |
| Tesla | 3.3% |
| Everything else | 19.9% |
| Held for | Share of trades | Ended in profit | Middle return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under a minute | 29.3% | 56.9% | 0.01% |
| 1 to 5 minutes | 13.6% | 60.7% | 0.04% |
| 5 to 60 minutes | 11.8% | 64.1% | 0.20% |
| 1 to 24 hours | 16.3% | 70.7% | 1.92% |
| 1 to 7 days | 11.0% | 74.2% | 5.71% |
| Over a week | 7.6% | 73.7% | 16.83% |
| Never closed | 10.4% | 62.6% | 27.02% |
| Leverage | Share of trades | Ended in profit | Gained half or more | Lost nearly all |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 25.4% | 56.8% | 4.3% | 0.4% |
| 5x | 7.3% | 61.0% | 8.2% | 2.7% |
| 10x | 6.9% | 63.3% | 9.9% | 3.8% |
| 20x | 44.3% | 67.3% | 9.2% | 3.4% |
| 100x | 16.1% | 69.7% | 33.2% | 10.6% |
| Bought | Sold | Forgotten |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto | 1.0% | 27.3% |
| Shares | 2.8% | 52.6% |
| Indexes | 0.7% | 35.1% |
| Commodities | 3.7% | 31.6% |
| Currencies | 0.2% | 2.6% |
| Top share of players | Share of profit |
|---|---|
| 1% | 42.8% |
| 2% | 56.5% |
| 5% | 77.4% |
| 10% | 91.2% |
| 20% | 98.5% |
| 50% | 100.0% |
| Country | 100x trades | Crypto | Bets on falls | Closed in a minute | Never closed | Players in profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 18% | 46% | 24% | 32% | 11% | 65% |
| United Kingdom | 18% | 44% | 25% | 31% | 10% | 68% |
| Germany | 17% | 43% | 25% | 29% | 11% | 69% |
| Canada | 13% | 45% | 24% | 33% | 10% | 69% |
| Italy | 13% | 45% | 26% | 32% | 10% | 66% |
| France | 12% | 42% | 28% | 24% | 11% | 67% |
| Australia | 15% | 45% | 14% | 32% | 12% | 69% |
| Spain | 13% | 44% | 27% | 30% | 9% | 70% |
| Netherlands | 16% | 40% | 27% | 27% | 11% | 71% |
| Belgium | 15% | 46% | 23% | 29% | 12% | 69% |
| Czechia | 15% | 50% | 26% | 32% | 13% | 66% |
| Switzerland | 20% | 44% | 21% | 29% | 9% | 69% |
| Singapore | 13% | 43% | 29% | 27% | 10% | 64% |
| Israel | 18% | 43% | 24% | 35% | 14% | 66% |
| Sweden | 34% | 39% | 21% | 24% | 11% | 70% |
| Hungary | 16% | 42% | 26% | 24% | 11% | 66% |
| Austria | 14% | 38% | 17% | 33% | 8% | 70% |