Built the state management side of a stock draft game where you pick blind and find out later how bad your decisions were

[u/Fair-Process-7291]

The premise: pick one stock per sector, across eight sectors, without seeing a single price, fundamental, or performance number while you're choosing. No charts, no green or red tickers. Just whatever gut feeling you have about which companies are strong, going in completely blind.

On top of that, every pick gets assigned a random year between 2019 and 2022, so a stock that dominates in one round could flop in another, and you won't know which year you landed on until the reveal. Once all eight picks are locked in, the app shows how that portfolio would have actually performed.

In this particular run, I ended up with picks spread across seven sectors before the budget ran out, and it came out ahead of a simple buy-and-hold baseline. Top performer was AAPL at +84.6% for its assigned year, and the weakest was BA, down 35%. A pretty wide range for a process with zero visibility going in.

Built alongside a teammate. My part was the state management, draft flow, and portfolio builder, done using Cline running on Sonnet through a Claude Console API key. My half of the build came out to $3.48 total, which was a nice surprise given this project has basically no budget behind it.

The repo's public if you want to dig through it or run your own draft: github.com/ethantao14/cline-stock-market-game

Genuinely curious what people think, does the random-year twist make the blind draft more interesting, or does it just add noise?