Read the Tape

A blind chart-reading drill dressed up as a trading desk. Five real S&P 500 charts a day arrive with the ticker, the company and the dates stripped out, and all you have to do is call whether the next five trading days go up or down. The charts are the real thing rather than pictures, drawn with TradingView and carrying the same indicator toggles you would reach for on a live terminal. Your score is money: a $10,000 book that follows you across the session, staked according to how sure you feel. And you are not graded against zero, you are graded against the Monkey Index, which the site describes as a low-fee product tracking eleven monkeys with no mandate and no risk committee.

1. Study the chart. The strip above it already gives you RSI, ATR and how far price sits from its 50-day average, and the row underneath lets you lay on moving averages, Bollinger Bands, MACD or volume.
2. Choose a conviction: Low, Medium or High. The button prints the actual dollar stake, which is a slice of whatever your book is worth right now, so a High call late in a good session risks a lot more than a High call at the start.
3. Hit UP or DOWN. The chart then walks forward one trading day at a time, DAY 1 OF 5 through DAY 5 OF 5, with your running profit ticking beside it.

Most finance games are trivia with a stock ticker painted on. This one hides the name and the date and forces you to read the shape, which is the only skill that actually transfers. The Monkey Index is the joke that carries the whole design: measuring you against eleven animals with no information at all is a very pointed reminder that beating a coin flip is the hard part, and the session review telling you you went 4 for 5 but the basket did too lands harder than a plain score would. And the reveal is a small history lesson every time, because behind each anonymous squiggle there is a real company having a real week.

The settlement card is the whole reason to play. It reports what your book made, what the monkeys made on the same chart and which way they leaned (constituents 6-5 long), and whether you beat the benchmark. Underneath it grades the technical signals one by one with a tick or a cross and a sentence of reasoning, so a losing call comes with an explanation: RSI(14) at 75, overbought earns a tick, alongside a warning that in strong trends RSI can stay overbought for weeks and overbought alone is not a sell signal. Only then does the curtain lift on what you were actually trading. A ticker, a company, a date range and a short paragraph of context, as in PRUDENTIAL, PRU, April to July 2016, followed by a note that the Brexit vote had just hammered financials and this was the week the relief rally took hold. Getting a call wrong and then reading why is more instructive than getting it right.

Daily set

The main event. Five blind charts, one bankroll, numbered by edition and identical for every player that day.

Performance review

The wrap-up screen. Session alpha over the Monkey Index, a bonus pool figure, your streak, a share receipt with the day laid out as green and red squares, plus links into your career record and the day's desk stats.

Your file

A longer-run track record that opens up over repeated sessions. It starts you on Diagnostic 1 and counts down how many more calls you owe it.

• Conviction is a compounding decision, not a confidence badge. High is roughly 89% of your book, so one bad High call early can wipe out four good Lows, and a High late in a winning session is staking your gains rather than your stake.
• The header strip is doing real work before you even open the indicators. A line reading 50 EXT +7.3× is telling you price is stretched a long way from its 50-day average, which is exactly the setup where a textbook uptrend read gets punished.
• Do not fight the five-day horizon. You are not calling a top or a bottom, you are calling one week, and the trend-following note the game keeps repeating is that an established trend is more likely to continue than reverse over a days-to-weeks window.
• Toggle the moving averages on before you commit. The signal grader judges your call against exactly those lines, so seeing what it will see is free.