People call gold safe, tech risky, and Bitcoin a digital gold mine. We wanted to test those labels instead of just repeating them. This project compares old money and new money through the same real market crises.
Old money — gold, bonds, banks, and energy: the familiar assets people often trust when markets get shaky.
New money — tech, crypto, and innovation stocks: newer growth bets that can soar fast, but crack fast too.
Old money vs new money
Who Wins When
Markets Break?
A market crisis is when investors suddenly change what they trust. Some assets crash, some survive, and a few unexpectedly win.
SPY stays on as the S&P 500 benchmark.
After the episode
Follow the trade beyond one episode.
Follow your asset from the very beginning — starting with the Dot-Com Crash. Each time you click "Continue," the timeline grows to reveal the next crisis. SPY stays locked on as the benchmark.
Assets to show
Choose up to five assets. SPY always stays on for comparison.
Long view
From this crisis onward
Green bands show crisis windows.
Know your assets
Market sheet: every asset in the stress test
Use this like a market cheat sheet. Each row shows the asset, what $100 became, and why it matters. Click any row to open the full notes by crisis.
Build your own
Build your own $100 portfolio
Choose a starting year, pick assets, and split a hypothetical $100. Then compare your portfolio directly against the S&P 500 benchmark.
Old money New money
Project writeup
Afterword
This project started from how casual finance advice can sound more certain than it really is. People talk about safe assets, risky assets, growth assets, inflation hedges, and digital gold as if those labels stay true in every situation. But markets are not that consistent. A crisis changes what people trust, and when trust changes, the same asset can suddenly tell a very different story.
We used $100 as the starting point because it makes the question feel concrete. Instead of looking at a price chart from far away, the viewer is asked to imagine a small decision made at the wrong or right moment. The point is not to find one perfect investment, but to make the tradeoffs visible. The old money and new money framing came from that tension. At first, the categories sound almost too clean: one side carries the language of stability, while the other carries the language of growth and speculation. Once they are placed inside different crises, they start to fracture. Old money does not always protect. New money does not always collapse. The story depends on what kind of crisis the market is living through.
Alyvia worked on the animations, graph behavior, and overall page layout. Devin handled the video and gave feedback on the flow of the project, especially what needed to be clearer for someone watching or using it for the first time. Alexa worked on the visual style, chart refinements, wording, asset explanations, and the overall story of old money versus new money.
A lot of the project became about learning how much the page should show at once. When we tried to show too many assets, the chart became unreadable. When the crisis labels were too clean, the historical moments disappeared. When the glossary became too boxed-in, it stopped feeling like a market sheet. The final version came out of those adjustments: limiting the long view, keeping SPY as a steady benchmark, using crisis bands as historical anchors, and making the asset notes specific enough that the data gaps and differences actually mattered.
That was the most interesting part of building this: the labels kept breaking, but so did some of our early design assumptions. Financial data can become messy very quickly, especially when assets move on completely different scales. The visualization had to become less about proving one asset was best and more about letting the viewer watch the meaning of “safe” change from crisis to crisis.
By the end, the clearest lesson is that no asset has a permanent personality. Safety is not a label an investment gets to keep forever. It depends on the crisis, the time period, and the fear driving the market. What survives one break may fail in the next, and what looks reckless in one decade can become the center of the next boom.
Data: historical Yahoo Finance prices via yfinance. The $100 framing is hypothetical — real prices, hypothetical investment scenario.