How to play Erstwhile
Erstwhile is a free daily investing puzzle. You invest $10,000 in a year you can't see, using real prices, and find out at the end whether you beat the stock market. There is one puzzle a day, and everyone plays the same one.
The setup
It's the end of a year somewhere between 2005 and 2020. You aren't told which. You have $10,000 and seven places to put it: four real company stocks, two other assets such as a metal or a commodity, and cash.
Placing your chips
Your money comes as ten chips of $1,000 each. You can put up to four chips on any one option, so you have to spread it at least a little. Each option has a short description and shows how it did over the past year.
The wire above the options shows real news headlines from that time. They are your best clue to where you are in history.
Year 2 and year 4
After two years you see what happened to your picks. You can hold everything as it is, or rebalance and place ten chips again, each now worth a tenth of your new total. At year 4 you get the same choice once more.
The reveal
After year 5 the years are revealed. You see:
- what your $10,000 became,
- what an S&P 500 fund did over the same five years,
- where you rank against everyone who played that day,
- how many of the possible plays you beat, and the most any plan could have made.
Under your results, open The backstory to learn what moved the market. It has fact-checked notes on what drove the market in those five years, and on the day's biggest winner and biggest loser.
You can save a certificate of your result or copy a short summary to share.
Streaks and the Erstwhile Market
Play on days in a row to build a streak. After three days you can claim a ticker for your own company. From a 5-day streak it starts trading at $10: its price goes up on days you beat the S&P 500 and down on days you don't. At 10 days it joins the public ranking, the Erstwhile Market.
Where the numbers come from
Stocks, metals and the S&P 500 use year-end closing prices, adjusted for splits and dividends (StatMuse). Commodities and US natural gas use December average prices (IMF, via FRED). Erstwhile is a game about the past, and nothing in it is financial advice.