22 August 2026

Everyone thinks they would have bought the dip

Ask anyone what they would have done in March 2020 and you will get the same answer. They would have bought. Obviously they would have bought — look at the chart.

The chart is the problem. You are looking at a picture with the ending already drawn on it.

What the chart does not show

On 23 March 2020 the S&P 500 had fallen 34% in thirty-three days. That is the fact everyone remembers. Here are the facts nobody repeats:

• The falls were not orderly. There were four separate days of more than 9%, and two of those were upwards, which felt like the bottom and was not.
• Gold, the thing you buy when you are frightened, fell 12% in the same nine days. The insurance failed in the week it was needed.
• Nobody knew how long it would last. Not two weeks, not two years — the honest answer available at the time was that nobody knew.

Being right about the price is the easy half

The hard half is holding a position while it goes against you, when there is no information telling you whether you are early or wrong, because those two look identical from the inside.

This is why “I would have bought the dip” is not really a claim about markets. It is a claim about temperament, and temperament is the one thing a chart cannot show you.

The only way to find out

You cannot test this by reading. You can only test it by making the decision without the ending available — which is what Ghost Run is for. The covid replay puts seventeen companies in front of you across early 2020: an airline, a bank, a supermarket, a drugmaker. They did not have the same year at all.

Most people discover they are not who they thought. That is worth finding out with pretend money.

Ghost Run is a simulator using historical market data. Nothing here is financial advice.