What If You Bought the S&P 500 on the Fourth of July Every Year for 20 Years?

Markets are closed on the Fourth of July. It is one of a handful of holidays every year when nothing trades, the kind of long weekend built around a barbecue and fireworks, where checking a brokerage account is the last thing on anyone's mind. Which makes it a good moment for a thought experiment. What if, every Fourth of July for the last 20 years, you had put $1,000 into the S&P 500 and left it alone?

Twenty years, $1,000 each, $20,000 contributed in total. As of the latest monthly close it would be worth approximately $99,567, a gain of +397.8%, or about $79,567 in profit. One $1,000 habit, repeated once a year, turned into nearly five times what you put in.

Every Fourth of July, Year by Year

A quick honesty note on the date. The market is actually closed on the Fourth of July, so nobody literally buys that day. The figures above use the June monthly close as the stand-in, which is the data this site runs on and lands within a few days of the holiday every year. The point is the once-a-year discipline, not the exact tick.

The First Few Dollars Carried the Whole Thing

Notice how lopsided the right column is. The four buys from 2006 through 2009 are worth about $35,160 today, more than a third of the entire ending balance, off just a fifth of the contributions. The single best one was the 2009 buy at $67.72, made in the wreckage of the financial crisis, now worth $11,174 on its own. The most recent buys have barely moved because they have had no time to grow, and if you keep the habit, this year's Fourth of July buy would be number 21, starting at square one like every fresh dollar before it. This is compounding in plain sight: the earliest dollars have had nearly two decades to work, and they dwarf everything you added recently.

The Caveat That Makes It Even Better

These are price-only numbers. They do not include dividends. The S&P 500 has paid roughly 1.5% to 2% a year in dividends across this period, and an investor who reinvested those payouts would have meaningfully more than $99,567 today, comfortably into six figures. So if anything, the real-world result for someone holding a total-return fund was better than the table shows, not worse.

Why Not Just Lump It All In?

In hindsight, dumping all $20,000 into SPY back in 2006 at $87.97 would be worth about $172,036 today, far more than spreading it out. But that misses the point. Almost nobody has 20 years of savings sitting in cash in 2006. The Fourth of July plan is what a normal person can actually do: set aside $1,000 once a year and keep going through 2008, through 2020, through every scary headline. The discipline is the strategy, and it still nearly quintupled the money.

The Bottom Line

Buying $1,000 of the S&P 500 every Fourth of July for 20 years would have turned $20,000 into about $99,567, and more than that with dividends reinvested. No timing, no stock picking, no watching the market over the long weekend. Just one boring annual habit and a lot of patience. Past performance does not guarantee the next 20 years, but the mechanics of it have been remarkably durable.

For the same idea on a different long weekend, see what $1,000 of the S&P 500 every Memorial Day for 20 years did. For the long-run version, see what $1,000 in the S&P 500 would be worth from six different start years, and what staying invested through every crash looks like in never panic selling, or whether a seasonal rule beats a steady habit in sell in May and go away. For how the index is doing this year specifically, see the S&P 500 mid-year 2026 report card. Or tie the same habit to a bonus instead of a date in investing your summer bonus every year. You can model your own contribution plan in the calculator.