AAPL vs MSFT: The DCA Backtest
The identical plan — $100 on the first trading day of each month — run on both assets over their shared history (Mar 1986 → Aug 2026, $48,600 invested each). Every number below is computed from real daily closes; nothing is annualized away or cherry-picked.
Verdict on this window: $48,600 invested into AAPL grew to $28,599,406, versus $19,008,652 in MSFT. Different start dates shuffle this result — the rolling analysis below shows how often.
The same $100/month, side by side
Both positions month by month across the shared window: the dashed line is cash paid in ($48,600 total), the two curves are what AAPL and MSFT were worth along the way. Where the curves separate is where the decade's story lives.
Does the winner depend on when you started?
One full-window result can mislead — maybe the winner just had a better final year. So we ran the head-to-head across EVERY possible 5-year start month in the shared history:
Side-by-side numbers
Data through Aug 2026, refreshed daily.
Two survivors, two different deserts
The two largest companies on earth got here along different roads: Apple through hardware supercycles (near-bankruptcy in 1997, iPhone repricing after 2007), Microsoft through a fifteen-year sideways desert after 2000 that the cloud era finally ended. Their shared window since 1986 contains both ordeals — which is why each side's worst 5-year stretch in the table is so instructive.
The pair is a warning about extrapolating giants: whichever leads this decade's backtest mostly reflects whose repricing came later, not who is 'better'. Both remain single-company risks — regulation, a product miss, a platform shift — which is why the honest use of this page is sizing them within an index core, not choosing one as a portfolio.
FAQ
On the shared window measured here, AAPL finished ahead (AAPL: +58747% vs MSFT: +39012% on identical monthly buys). "Better" is window-dependent — the rolling head-to-head above tells you how stable that verdict was. Past performance doesn't predict the future; this page tells you what happened, not what will.
Yes, and if the pair is highly correlated the blend will behave like either one alone — check how similar the two curves above are before assuming a split adds diversification. Our portfolio calculator lets you backtest any weighting of the two on the same real data.
Real dividend- and split-adjusted daily closes for AAPL and MSFT, compared strictly over their shared history (Mar 1986 → Aug 2026), refreshed daily and validated for gaps and staleness. Fees, spreads and taxes are not modelled — see the methodology page.
Run the plan on a real exchange
Five exchanges where DCA — and tokenized stocks & ETFs — actually work, each with a real discount. Pick one, copy the code, trade cheaper.
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