How the game works.
Draft real S&P 500 stocks across sector positions, set a weekly lineup, and each week play two games: your head-to-head rival and the S&P 500 itself. The rules below came out of a Monte Carlo study — we tested the obvious alternatives and kept what survived.
Playing already? The in-app Learn page covers the same rules plus every stat on the stock cards.
Pick your format
Three modes share the same locked per-week rules (roster, lineup, scoring, captain, beat-the-S&P). What changes is the season shape.
Monthly
Fastest path to a champion. 4-week regular season, top-4 single-elimination bracket. Default.
4 + 4
Classic
The long-form season. 13-week round-robin, top-6 bracket (seeds 1–2 get a bye).
13 + 6
Battle Royale
Field-scored sprint — no 1v1. Each week you bank a win for beating the S&P 500; top of the leaderboard wins.
Royale
Captain (all formats): chosen weekly with your lineup and worth 2×. There's no draft-locked captain and no swap budget — you pick a fresh captain every week, forward-looking.
The roster — 5 sector positions
Each team holds 7 stocks. Every stock belongs to one of five curated sector positions (a clean GICS-sector union). A league plays 4 of these + a FLEX; public leagues use a fixed curated four, private leagues choose. Ownership is exclusive within a league — once a ticker's gone, it's gone. Market cap sorts the board; volatility is a descriptive stat, never a scoring axis.
The draft — open snake
- Snake order, 7 rounds — pick order reverses each round.
- Open: take the best stock you believe in, of any sector — with one constraint: reserve enough late picks to finish lineup-legal(able to field one of each of your league's 4 played sectors).
- No captain at the draft — the captain is a weekly pick. The draft just builds your 7-deep roster.
Your weekly lineup — start 5 of 7
- Each week you start 5 of your 7: one of each of your league's 4 played sectors + a FLEX (any sector). The other 2 are bench and don't score.
- Pick a captain (2×) from your 5 starters.
- Set it forward-looking and locked before Monday's market open. Miss the lock and last week's lineup carries over (week 1 → your drafted starters).
Weekly scoring
Only your 5 starters score, on their Friday-to-Friday return. Weights are fixed.
Beat the S&P 500
Every regular-season week resolves a second, independent result: your weekly score (%) vs the S&P 500's Friday→Friday return (%).
- Beat the index = a full win, on top of your head-to-head result. So a regular week is 2-0, 1-1, or 0-2.
- Playoffs are pure head-to-head — the index win doesn't apply in elimination weeks.
- In Battle Royale, beating the index is your weekly win.
The matchup & standings
- Higher weekly score wins the head-to-head.
- Tiebreak: total points-for (season-to-date), then a coin flip.
- Standings sort by wins (head-to-head plusbeat-the-S&P), then points-for.
- Optional All-green bonus: +1.5 if every started holding finishes positive that week. Off by default.
What we deliberately didn't build
These alternatives were tested against the rules above. The scoreboard preferred the locked version every time.
- No 'diversified basket' mode (a bigger all-scoring roster on total return). The 7-deep roster is sanctioned precisely because only 5 score — and you set the bench.
- No automatic 'best N of M' lineup. The system never picks your starters in hindsight; forward-looking, manual start/sit is the whole point.
- No retroactive or hindsight captain/lineup changes — everything locks before Monday's open.
- No per-pick return caps or winsorizing.
- No ETFs, and never leveraged ETFs — single-name S&P 500 equities only. (The S&P 500 index itself is a non-draftable benchmark, used only for the beat-the-S&P game.)
- No real money, wagering, or brokerage execution. Bragging rights only.