We DCA'd $100 a Month Into Every S&P 500 Stock for 10 Years
The same boring plan — $100 on the first trading day of each month, 10 years, $12,000 total — run separately on all 464 current S&P 500 constituents with full price history, then compared against simply buying the index. This page is the complete result, and the dataset is free to download below.
Data through Jul 2026 — refreshed weekly, recomputed on every site build.
Key findings
- Only 34.9% of S&P 500 stocks beat the index itself: dollar-cost averaging into SPY returned +125%, more than 65.1% of its own components achieved.
- The median S&P 500 stock turned $12,000 of monthly contributions into a +82.4% total return — barely two-thirds of the index's result on identical dates.
- 9.7% of stocks — roughly 1 in 10 — ended BELOW the $12,000 invested, after ten full years of disciplined monthly buying.
- The gap between luck and disaster is enormous: a 90th-percentile stock returned +306.9% while a 10th-percentile stock returned +0.3% — same plan, same decade, different ticker.
- The mean return (+149.6%) sits far above the median (+82.4%): a handful of extreme winners drag the average up, which is precisely the lottery an index ticket holds for you automatically.
The full distribution
Each bar counts stocks by total 10-year DCA return. The dashed marker is SPY (+125%) — everything left of it underperformed the index on the identical schedule.
Distribution statistics
Best 10 outcomes
Worst 10 outcomes
Methodology — and the bias you must know about
For every stock we simulated the identical plan the site's calculators use: $100 at the first trading day's dividend- and split-adjusted close of each month for 10 years, position valued at the latest close (2026-07-24). No fees, spreads or taxes are modelled; dividend reinvestment is implicit in adjusted closes. 464 of the 503 current constituents had a full 10 years of validated history; the rest (recent IPOs and listings) were excluded rather than backfilled.
The result is biased UPWARD, and honesty requires saying so twice. These are today's S&P 500 members — companies that succeeded enough to be in the index now. The stocks that collapsed, delisted or were acquired along the way are invisible here. The real odds of single-stock picking a decade ago were WORSE than this page shows — which makes the headline finding stronger, not weaker: even among certified survivors, two-thirds trailed the index.
Download the dataset
Every row of this study — ticker, company, invested, final value, total return — is free to download and reuse with attribution (link to this page). Journalists and researchers: the methodology above is the complete recipe; the numbers regenerate weekly with fresh closes.
FAQ
In this study, 34.9% of the 464 constituents with full 10-year history beat a same-schedule DCA plan into SPY (+125%). About 65.1% of the index's own members underperformed it — the concentration of extreme winners means the index's return is NOT the typical stock's return.
Yes — 9.7% of S&P 500 stocks in this study ended below the total invested after 10 years of monthly buys. DCA lowers entry-timing risk; it does not rescue a business in decline. That's company risk, and diversification — not scheduling — is the tool against it.
Yes, unavoidably: it covers current index members, so companies that failed out of the index along the way are missing. That bias flatters single stocks. Since even these survivors mostly trailed the index, the practical conclusion — the index ticket captures the winners for you — only gets stronger after adjusting for it.
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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