July 21, 2026
Monkey Business on Wall Street
Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
A stock-picking game drops monkeys, market guesses, and a full-blown comment war
TLDR: Read the Tape turns stock-chart guessing into a daily game and grades you against a random “Monkey Index,” which instantly became the star of the conversation. Commenters were split between calling it fun and shareable, and roasting the whole idea as little more than market astrology.
A new Show HN project called Read the Tape is pitching itself as Wordle for day trading: every day, players get five mystery stock charts from big American companies, guess whether each one will go up or down, and bet with low, medium, or high confidence. The twist that sent commenters into delight-and-disbelief mode? Your score is judged against the Monkey Index — basically a pretend fund powered by random monkey-level guessing. Yes, the benchmark is chaos, and the internet absolutely noticed.
The comments quickly turned into a mini culture war over whether this is clever fun or just finance cosplay. One user loved the concept and said the description was perfectly clear, even suggesting it would be hilarious to compare human results with a large language model, the kind of artificial intelligence behind chatbots. Another immediately zeroed in on the viral potential, saying it needs an easy copy-paste share feature because that is what made Wordle explode with friends flexing their scores.
But the real fireworks came from the skeptics. One commenter basically asked: if players can beat random guessing, is that only because the charts were hand-picked to be extra dramatic? In other words, is the game testing skill, or just serving up juicy patterns? And then came the knockout punch of the thread: “Technical analysis is astrology for boys.” That line pretty much stole the show, turning a quirky market game into a comment-section roast about whether reading stock charts is insight, illusion, or just horoscopes with candlesticks.
Key Points
- •Read the Tape presents five daily charts for users to evaluate.
- •Players make an up-or-down call on each chart.
- •Users set conviction levels that determine the size of a paper wager.
- •The game is based on S&P 500 charts.
- •Player performance is compared with the Monkey Index, described as a low-fee product tracking eleven monkeys.