A real year of crypto prices, with the coin and the dates hidden. You start fully invested. Sell to cash when you expect a fall, buy back in when you expect a rise, and see at the end whether your timing beat simply holding. Every buy and every sell pays a 0.1% fee.
Blue line: the hidden coin's daily close as an index, 100 on day 0. Gray shading: days you were in cash. Green dots: buys. Red dots: sells.
Press Start the round and the chart moves forward one real day at a time, using daily closing prices from the Bybit exchange. You begin with $10,000 of play money already invested, just like a buy and hold investor who bought on day 0. Press Sell to cash to step out at the latest close and Buy back in to return. Every switch happens at the close you can see, so you never trade on a price you have not seen yet. You can pause, move one day at a time or change the speed, and on a computer the space bar switches too.
Mystery year gives you 364 days from a random start in one of seven coins. Crash replay drops you into one of the periods in the data where a coin closed at least 30% lower than it had 30 days earlier, with 60 days before the fall and 60 days after it. When the round ends you see your final value next to buy and hold, the fees you paid, the days you were invested, your worst drop from a high and whether you sat in cash on the biggest up and down days. Then the coin and the dates are revealed.
To beat buy and hold you have to be out during the falls and back in for the rises. The trouble is that the biggest moves in both directions tend to come together. We checked every 364-day stretch in the data, starting a new one each week, across all seven coins: 1,488 windows. Of the 10 best days in each window, 48.8% came within 7 days of one of that window's 10 worst days, and the median gap was 8 days. Bitcoin's second-best day in this data, February 6, 2026, came the day after its third-worst, and its fifth-best, November 10, 2022, came the day after its second-worst. A player who sells after a frightening drop is often in cash for the rebound.
Costs add up too. Each round trip, a sell and a later buy, pays two fees, 0.2% of the money moved, so a player who switches often has to be right often just to break even.
The table uses each coin's whole Bybit history in this data, from its first day to September 24, 2026. Buy and hold buys at the first close and sells at the last. The other two columns make the same investment but sit in cash on the 10 best days or on the 10 worst days, which means selling at the close before and buying back at that day's close. All three pay the 0.1% fee on every trade.
| Coin | Days | Buy and hold | Missing the 10 best days | Missing the 10 worst days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | 1,907 | +149.9% | -14.7% | +749.6% |
| Ethereum (ETH) | 1,907 | +22.1% | -73.6% | +467.4% |
| Solana (SOL) | 1,799 | -38.8% | -91.6% | +472.4% |
| XRP (XRP) | 1,892 | +189.8% | -74.6% | +1,645.1% |
| Dogecoin (DOGE) | 1,850 | -65.6% | -96.3% | +146.0% |
| Cardano (ADA) | 1,799 | -88.5% | -98.7% | -27.1% |
| Avalanche (AVAX) | 1,777 | -88.0% | -98.0% | +0.9% |
Each history has between 1,777 and 1,907 days, and just 10 of them decided a large part of the result. For Bitcoin, being in cash on its 10 best days turned a gain of 149.9% into a loss of 14.7%. Being in cash on the 10 worst days would have made the result far larger, but both lists are only known afterwards, and as shown above they sat close together. The table also shows that holding is no guarantee: four of the seven coins ended below their starting price over this period.
Cash earns nothing in this game. Prices are quoted in USDT and the game counts one USDT as one dollar. Your scoreboard, the rounds in which you beat buy and hold, is kept in this browser only.
To test a fixed rule instead of your own judgment, the trading strategy game runs several strategies over a real year. The buy and hold vs active trading guide covers the costs and taxes of trading more often, and the stop loss simulator zooms in on single trades over 10 days of 4-hour candles.
Educational, not financial advice. This game replays past prices. It does not predict future prices or recommend buying, selling or holding any coin.
Yes. Every chart uses daily closing prices from Bybit's spot market for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano and Avalanche against USDT, downloaded with the open-source ccxt library and stored unchanged. The money is play money and no real trades are made.
Because people remember famous tops and crashes. Hiding the coin and the dates, and showing the price as an index that starts at 100, makes you decide the way you would in real time, without knowing what comes next.
Every buy and every sell costs 0.1% of the amount traded. Buy and hold pays twice, on the first buy and the final sell. You pay the same two plus two more for every round trip, and anything you still hold on the last day is sold at the last close.
The change from one daily close to the next. After the round, the game ranks every day in it and checks whether you were in cash on the 10 largest rises and the 10 largest falls.
No. In this data four of the seven coins finished their full history below where they started, so buy and hold lost money on them. The game compares your decisions with holding over one real period. It shows how hard it is to do better by switching, not that holding is safe.