This market is a geometric random walk with three weather regimes — calm, turbulent, and crash — switching by chance each month, the same mathematics used to stress-test real portfolios.
The dashed ghost lives through the identical months you do: same seed, same storms, no fees, and your cash parks at 2% a year. Any gap between you and it is pure timing — nothing else.
Decades of market history show what this instrument shows: the best days cluster inside the worst stretches, and an investor who stepped out and missed only a handful of them gave up a large share of the entire return.
Volatility is how much the ride swings. Risk is permanent loss. On this stage, the only mechanism that converts one into the other is the lever.
This lab hit a snag — the lesson continues without it.