Read the Tape is a free daily game where players view five historical S&P 500 price charts with tickers and dates hidden and all prices normalised to a starting value of 100. This report covers the first fourteen days of active game play, from July 5 to July 18, 2026.
During this fourteen day period, active players submitted 6,012 calls. The mean stated confidence was 73.8%, and the overall hit rate was 53.8%. Because every active participant plays the same five charts daily, these calls are not independent observations. The effective sample size is 70 charts rather than 6,012 calls, so one heavy day can swing a week of numbers. Fourteen days is early in the project, and these statistics may change as more charts are played.
The stated confidence level carries almost no information regarding whether a call lands. High confidence calls land barely more often than low confidence calls, and accuracy stays flat across the range.
| stated confidence | calls | hit rate |
|---|---|---|
| low · 55-64% | 1,122 | 47.4% |
| medium · 65-74% | 2,909 | 55.0% |
| high · 85-94% | 1,968 | 55.8% |
A bearish bias was visible in the data, with 43% of all calls predicting a DOWN movement. Only 31.4% of these bearish calls were correct, while bullish calls predicting an UP price movement hit a 70.8% success rate. Over this period, 42 of 70 charts, or 60.0%, resolved in an upward direction. An always-up rule, weighted by where player calls landed, would have hit 69.8%. Players chose the correct direction 53.8% of the time.
Since July 12, every call has also settled against the Monkey Index, an equal weight basket of eleven seeded coin flip monkeys, each taking a random side of every chart at minimum confidence. Players have beaten the monkeys on 54.2% of 1,785 settled calls. The majority opinion of the players was correct on 36 of 65 decided charts.
The last seven complete days: charts that rose vs fell, with the crowd's hit rate.
One footnote from the week: the crowd's widest margin over the always-up benchmark came on Friday, the week's worst tape, when only one chart in five rose and the crowd still hit 51.9% against the benchmark's 20.4%. Bears finally got a day.
The game deals five new blind charts at 00:00 UTC every day.