Crude Oil DCA Calculator
What a fixed monthly buy of Crude Oil actually did — computed from real daily closes (Aug 2000 → Jul 2026), not projections. Run your own amount and schedule below.
What $100 a month actually built
The last 10 years of a $100 monthly plan in Oil, month by month: the flat line is cash paid in ($12,100 total), the accent line is what the position was worth along the way — ending at $17,014. Every point is computed from that day's real close.
Timing luck, quantified
Same plan, different start month. Each bar below is one possible 5-year monthly DCA window in Oil's history, sorted from worst to best — the honest spread between unlucky and lucky timing, and the case for starting on a schedule instead of waiting:
252 possible 5-year start months — 71% ended positive.
Why dollar-cost average into crude oil?
Oil is pure boom-bust: $147 in 2008, the thirties months later, and in April 2020 the front-month contract famously crashed through zero. There is no yield and no compounding engine underneath — just OPEC, recessions and supply shocks. If you want exposure anyway, a schedule fits the shape of the asset: mean-reverting crashes are where monthly buys do their best work, and the strip above shows how brutally start-month-dependent single entries were.
Two honesty notes bite harder here than anywhere else on the site. Our series tracks front-month futures prices — an investable oil ETF (USO is the famous cautionary tale) suffers roll costs that can erase years of gains, so treat this as price-trend analysis, not an achievable return. And oil's long-run real return has been poor; most portfolios that hold it do so as a small inflation hedge, not a compounder.
FAQ
History, not opinion: $100 every month into Oil for the last 10 years (121 buys, $12,100 invested) would be worth $17,014 today — +41% before fees and taxes. Past performance doesn't predict the future, but that's what the plan actually produced.
The worst 5-year monthly-DCA start in Oil's history began May 2015 and finished at -61%. The best (Jul 2003) finished at +164%. DCA doesn't delete timing luck — it narrows it and removes the decision.
A lump sum bets everything on one entry price. Monthly DCA spreads your cost across Oil's ups and downs — you buy more units when it's cheap, fewer when it's expensive. Compare both directly in our lump sum vs DCA calculator.
Real Oil daily closing prices from Aug 2000 to Jul 2026 (25.9 years), refreshed weekly and validated for gaps, zeros and staleness — see the data & methodology page. Fees, spreads and taxes are not modelled.
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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