What you're seeing
1,000 investors all flipping the same coin. Each round, winners multiply their portfolio and losers shrink theirs. When someone drops below the bust threshold, they're eliminated. After many rounds, the handful of survivors look like geniuses.
How to read the graph
Teal/gold lines are surviving investors — the ones you'd see on magazine covers. Click 'Show Eliminated' to reveal hundreds of faint red lines — investors who played the exact same game with the same odds and lost. The gold line is the single best performer.
The key lesson
We study winners and reverse-engineer 'strategy' from their success, while ignoring the graveyard of identical strategies that failed. At 50% win probability, there is zero skill involved — yet survivors develop impressive track records. This is survivorship bias, and it's the most dangerous cognitive error in evaluating success.