Investing
Investing monthly starting at the 2022 market peak
The S&P 500 topped out in the first days of January 2022 and then fell for most of the year. This plan starts exactly there: 500 dollars into VOO on the first trading day of every month from January 2022, with no way of knowing what was coming.
Final portfolio value
$44,660.13
Total invested
Absolute profit
Annualized return (IRR)
Max drawdown (MDD)
Compare scenarios
Pin these figures as scenario A, then change any input above to see the difference.
Portfolio value over time
Transaction log
| Date | Price | Investment | Shares | Cost | APB | Total shares | Portfolio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-01-03 | $412.05 | $500.00 | 1.2134470317022743 | $500.00 | $412.05 | 1.213 | $500.00 |
| 2022-02-01 | $390.60 | $500.00 | 1.280065867069256 | $500.00 | $401.04 | 2.494 | $973.98 |
| 2022-03-01 | $370.86 | $500.00 | 1.3482234728942366 | $500.00 | $390.45 | 3.842 | $1,424.74 |
| 2022-04-01 | $391.85 | $500.00 | 1.2759834897944289 | $500.00 | $390.80 | 5.118 | $2,005.40 |
| 2022-05-02 | $358.69 | $500.00 | 1.393978847764964 | $500.00 | $383.92 | 6.512 | $2,335.65 |
| 2022-06-01 | $354.37 | $500.00 | 1.4109359387112002 | $500.00 | $378.66 | 7.923 | $2,807.58 |
| 2022-07-01 | $331.20 | $500.00 | 1.509672319584345 | $500.00 | $371.07 | 9.432 | $3,123.96 |
| 2022-08-01 | $356.91 | $500.00 | 1.400898872752713 | $500.00 | $369.24 | 10.833 | $3,866.52 |
| 2022-09-01 | $344.27 | $500.00 | 1.4523560410168586 | $500.00 | $366.28 | 12.286 | $4,229.53 |
| 2022-10-03 | $319.88 | $500.00 | 1.563096418977366 | $500.00 | $361.05 | 13.849 | $4,429.88 |
Performance summary
| Total return | +56.70% |
|---|---|
| Sharpe ratio | 0.76 |
| Average buy price (APB) | $451.82 |
| Buy & hold final value | $48,970.56 |
| Buy & hold return | +71.83% |
| DCA vs buy & hold | Buy & hold better |
| Final shares | 63.078 |
| Investments | 57 |
| Average per investment | $500.00 |
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Nothing on this page is investment advice.
The same money invested all at once
Lump sum final value
Monthly plan final value
Difference
The lump sum invests $28,500 — the same capital the monthly plan eventually contributed — at the first closing price of the period and holds it to 2026-09-04. No interest is credited to cash waiting to be invested.
If you had started at the worst possible moment
The worst moment is defined as the high that preceded the deepest fall in this window: VOO closed at $412.05 on 2022-01-03 and then fell 24.5% to $311.01 on 2022-10-12. Daily closing prices throughout. The run below buys the same amount, at the same frequency, starting on that high and holding to 2026-09-04.
This window already begins on its own highest close, so the figures below are the same run as above.
Contributed
Final value
Profit
Annualised return
Maximum drawdown
Buying the top is the outcome a lump sum risks and a contribution plan spreads out. The figures above are what that spreading was worth over this window and nothing more.
The same plan on different funds
$500 on the first trading day of each month from 2022-01-03, run to 2026-09-04 on each series in the committed price snapshot.
| Ticker | From | Contributed | Final value | Total return | Annualised | Max drawdown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QQQ | 2022-01-03 | $28,500 | $49,663 | 74.3% | 24.4% | 34.8% |
| SPY | 2022-01-03 | $28,500 | $44,579 | 56.4% | 19.5% | 24.5% |
| VOO | 2022-01-03 | $28,500 | $44,660 | 56.7% | 19.6% | 24.5% |
Every row contributes the same money on the same days, so the columns are directly comparable. Prices as of 2026-09-04. Yahoo Finance chart API — daily adjusted close (dividends reinvested)
The worst start of the cycle, on purpose
Backtests of contribution plans are usually run from convenient dates, and convenient dates flatter them. This one is deliberately inconvenient. It begins at the top of the cycle, so the first contribution was made at a price the market did not see again for a long time, and the following year of contributions were all made into a falling market. That is the situation the whole argument for a contribution plan is about, and it is worth seeing in numbers rather than in principle. Two figures above carry the answer. The average purchase price shows where a year of buying into a decline left the plan's cost basis, which is well below where a single purchase at the start would have left it. The maximum drawdown shows how far the plan's unit price fell along the way, measured on the unit price rather than the balance so that the monthly contributions cannot disguise it. Those two figures are in tension by design: the same fall that produced the frightening drawdown is what produced the low average price, and a plan that stopped when the drawdown was at its worst would have kept the loss and given up the cost basis. The count of purchases is small compared to the decade long runs elsewhere in this set, which also means the annualised return above is computed over a short period and is correspondingly noisy.
What a bad start does to the lump sum comparison
The lump sum baseline above invests the whole of this plan's capital at the first closing price of January 2022, which was very close to the top. This is the starting point most hostile to a lump sum, which makes the comparison worth reading against the pages here that begin in a rising market. Investing everything at once has the higher expected result and its worst case is precisely this one, while a contribution plan gives up some of that expectation for a narrower range of outcomes. Whether the narrower range was enough to win over this particular stretch is what the two figures above settle, and the answer depends as much on what happened after the fall as on the fall itself.
Questions about this backtest
Was January 2022 really the top?
The S&P 500's closing high for that cycle came in the first days of January 2022, and the index fell for most of the following year. The plan starts on the first trading day of that month.
Why is the annualised return unreliable over a short period?
Annualising a few years of returns projects whatever happened to occur in them onto a yearly rate. The shorter the window, the more a single move dominates it.
Other backtests worked out
- Investing 500 dollars a month in VOO since 2015
- Investing 100 dollars a month in VOO since 2015
- Investing 500 dollars a month in QQQ since 2015
Run your own plan in the Dollar-Cost Averaging Calculator and Backtest