How to play the daily investing game

The stake

You receive $10,000 as ten chips of $1,000. The board has four company stocks, two other assets (a metal, a commodity, or a bond fund), and cash. That is seven places. Any one of them can hold at most four chips, so you cannot put the whole stake on a single name.

Each option shows a short description and how it did over the previous year. A wire of real headlines sits above them. The how-to-play page calls those headlines the clue to the hidden year. Some headlines are trimmed so the date is not sitting in the sentence.

Year 2 and year 4

After two years you see what happened. You may hold the same mix, or sell everything and place ten new chips. Each new chip is worth one tenth of whatever the portfolio is worth then, not another flat $1,000.

Year 3 has no allocation. Prices keep moving and a new headline can appear, but you do not move chips. Year 4 offers the same hold-or-rebalance choice as year 2. Year 5 only reveals.

What the reveal shows

The public how-to-play page lists the final value, the S&P 500 fund over the same five years, your rank for the day, the share of possible plays you beat, the best result anyone could have posted, and a backstory with notes on the market. You can keep a certificate or copy a short summary.

Stock, metal, and S&P 500 prices are year-end closes, adjusted for splits and dividends, via StatMuse. Commodities and US natural gas use December average world prices, IMF via FRED. The long-term Treasury fund is in the price series; the public pages do not name a separate source for it, so I leave that cell blank rather than guess.

Counting the four-chip cap on seven options gives 4,795 legal ways to place the ten chips at one decision. I mark that as a count from the published rules. The how-to-play page itself does not print the number.

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