War · S&P 500 Index (1991)
From Sep 1990 to Apr 1991 the S&P 500 climbed 17.2% across 144 trading days. Replay each session step by step, work through 25 decision points, and receive an AI coach review of your simulated historical choices.
144 daily bars · 25 decision points · 1990-09 to 1991-04 · Stocks
Key facts
This window spans 208 days with a peak-to-trough drawdown of 8.6% and a 28.4% run-up.
- Max drawdown
- −8.6%
- Max run-up
- +28.4%
- Duration
- 208 days
- Largest single-day move
- +3.7%
- Bars
- 144 Daily bars
- Decision points
- 25
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
The Gulf War cast a long shadow over financial markets in the autumn of 1990. As coalition forces assembled in the Persian Gulf and diplomatic tensions escalated, investors faced a rare combination of geopolitical uncertainty and economic fragility. The S&P 500 sat at 323.4 on September 7, 1990, with traders confronting the prospect of prolonged conflict, energy price spikes, and an unclear path to resolution. This scenario places participants directly into that uncertainty, forcing decisions with incomplete information at critical junctures.
Over the following 144 trading days through April 3, 1991, the index climbed to 378.94—a 17.2% advance that confounded many bearish expectations. Yet the journey was anything but linear: the market endured an 8.6% max drawdown and absorbed moves as large as 3.7% in a single session. Those volatile single-bar swings typically coincided with battlefield developments or diplomatic announcements, moments when the gap between information and interpretation widened dangerously. Participants navigated 25 decision points, with 9 deemed critical, requiring them to act when headlines contradicted their positioning.
This replay teaches that geopolitical crises create survivable drawdowns for those who distinguish between noise and structural risk. The 8.6% pullback punished panic sellers while rewarding disciplined participants who held through uncertainty. For decision training, the scenario forces honest self-assessment: Did you anchor to early bearish narratives? Did you manage position size ahead of 3.7% intraday shocks? The Gulf War episode demonstrates that wars end, markets recover, and the psychological discipline to remain process-oriented through maximum uncertainty is what separates trained decision-makers from reactive ones.
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