Crash · S&P 500 Index (1997)
On June 16, 1997, the S&P 500 Index began a 144-day descent that carved a 10.8% drawdown. Replay each session, tackle 25 decision points, and receive an AI coach review of your crisis-era choices. Simulated capital only.
144 daily bars · 25 decision points · 1997-06 to 1998-01 · Stocks
Key facts
This window spans 206 days with a peak-to-trough drawdown of 10.8% and a 12.2% run-up.
- Max drawdown
- −10.8%
- Max run-up
- +12.2%
- Duration
- 206 days
- Largest single-day move
- −6.9%
- 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
On June 16, 1997, the S&P 500 Index opened a seven-month window in which complacency met a cascade of external shocks. With Asian currencies under escalating pressure and policy responses across the Pacific still taking shape, US equities began a long, grinding stretch in which every session carried the weight of cross-border contagion. The setting was not a domestic recession but a global test: how would a richly valued benchmark absorb news from economies that, only months earlier, had been celebrated as engines of world growth? The 144 trading days ahead would answer that question one bar at a time, forcing participants to distinguish signal from headline.
What unfolded was a measured but punishing decline. The index slipped from a 893.9 open to a 956.05 close across the span — a 7.0% net change — yet the headline figure masks the real damage: a maximum drawdown of 10.8%, with a single session lurching 6.9%. The path was not a straight line down but a sequence of sharp jolts interspersed with tentative rebounds, the kind of pattern that punishes both impatient sellers and stubborn holders. Each rebound tempted a re-entry, each gap-down rewarded the fearful, and the wide gap between peak and trough showed how far sentiment can travel between two adjacent decisions.
For decision training, the lesson is less about direction than about process. Twenty-five decision points, nine of them critical, demand that you separate a single data print from your thesis, that you size exposure to the drawdown you can tolerate rather than the move you expect, and that you write down your rationale before the next session opens. Volatility of this magnitude is a psychological instrument as much as a market one: it tests whether your rules survive a 6.9% bar, whether you rebalance on schedule or wait for certainty, and whether you treat a 10.8% drawdown as a stop signal or a research prompt. The replay rewards discipline over prediction.