BEL 20 Downtrend Replay (1997-10-06 to 1997-10-28)
Replay 34 daily bars of the 1997 BEL 20 correction, a textbook downtrend that erased 5.8% before finding a floor. Step through each session, weigh in at 7 decision points including 3 critical ones, and receive AI coach feedback after every simulated choice.
34 daily bars · 7 decision points · 1997-09 to 1997-11 · Stocks
Key facts
This window spans 45 days with a peak-to-trough drawdown of 12.0% and a 7.7% run-up.
- Max drawdown
- −12.0%
- Max run-up
- +7.7%
- Duration
- 45 days
- Largest single-day move
- +4.5%
- Bars
- 34 Daily bars
- Decision points
- 7
Every figure above is computed programmatically from this replay’s own candle series — no editorial input, no LLM. Methodology: Methodology
The market advances day by day. You only see candles up to the current day — as if you were really there.
At key decision points choose Buy / Trim / Exit / Hold. Each decision advances the timeline by one day.
After settlement you get a six-dimension score and an AI coach review. Your result enters the scenario leaderboard.
Event Replay
What happened — and what it teaches
In late September 1997, the BEL 20 entered a corrective phase against a backdrop of global market anxiety, with European bourses reacting to a wave of risk-off sentiment that had rippled outward from earlier Asian shocks. Belgian equities sat near a multi-month high, and the index's ability to absorb selling pressure was genuinely in question. Traders watching the tape faced the classic dilemma of a mature uptrend meeting a fresh macro narrative: defend prior longs, hedge exposure, or step aside entirely. The period between 1997-09-23 and 1997-11-07 thus offered a compact but rich laboratory for studying trend exhaustion, leadership rotation, and the subtle signals of a bottoming process.
Across 34 daily sessions, the index moved from 2405.7 to 2267.1, a headline decline of -5.8%, yet the path was far from orderly. The maximum drawdown reached 12.0%, meaning the worst observed drawdown across the window was roughly twice the endpoint-to-endpoint change and was experienced by participants who timed the move poorly. A single bar printed a 4.5% swing, the kind of session that punishes oversized positions and rewards disciplined stop placement. Seven decision points punctuated the tape, three of them flagged as critical, where the next-day direction depended heavily on the participant's read of momentum versus mean reversion.
The training value here lies less in identifying the obvious downtrend and more in navigating the human elements of it. Participants must learn to distinguish a genuine trend leg from a counter-trend bounce, to size risk before volatility spikes rather than after, and to record the reasoning behind each of the three critical calls so post-replay coaching can compare intent with outcome. The 1997 BEL 20 correction is a reminder that headlines measure endpoints, while portfolios experience drawdowns, and that disciplined process is what bridges the two.