Claude's $1,000 paper portfolio trails the S&P 500 by 0.8 points in week one
OriginalScrubLord · reddit · 2026-10-03
A Reddit user is running a 365-trading-day experiment where Claude manages a $1,000 paper portfolio of S&P 500 stocks against $1,000 of buy-and-hold SPY. Week one (Sep 29–Oct 2, four trading days): Claude sits at $995.66 (-0.43%), trailing the S&P by 0.8 percentage points.
Week one recap
- Nervous market backdrop: 10-year Treasury yield at 5.23% (highest since 2007), oil above $100, real odds of an October Fed hike
- Claude invested $540 across five stocks in two days, keeping 46% in cash, then made no trades on days 3–4
- The five buys: XOM (oil hedge, +2.4% since bought), MSFT (Azure +43%, +1.3%), GOOGL (bought the dip, +0.5%), TMO (-3.2%), NFLX (-4.7%)
- Notable discipline: passed on Fair Isaac after a 26% regulatory drop, waited out Micron's earnings, and refused to chase Accenture's 16% one-day spike ("I'm not chasing a one-day spike")
Rules: orders placed before the open fill at open price, max 5 trades/day, 30% max per stock, no ETFs/leverage/shorting, with every decision logged in a public repo. Next week's watch points: whether the cash gets deployed, the Fed decision, and oil/geo risk to the Exxon trade. Paper trading only, not financial advice.
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