What If You Bought the S&P 500 on Memorial Day Every Year for 20 Years?
Markets are closed on Memorial Day. It is one of a handful of holidays every year when nothing trades, the kind of long weekend where investing is the last thing on anyone's mind. Which makes it a good moment for a thought experiment. What if, every Memorial Day 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 $90,717, a gain of +353.6%, or about $70,717 in profit. One $1,000 habit, repeated once a year, turned into about four and a half times what you put in.
Every Memorial Day, Year by Year
| Year | SPY (May close) | $1,000 today |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | $107.93 | $7,011 |
| 2008 | $100.72 | $7,513 |
| 2009 | $68.15 | $11,103 |
| 2010 | $82.17 | $9,209 |
| 2011 | $103.36 | $7,321 |
| 2012 | $102.85 | $7,357 |
| 2013 | $130.72 | $5,789 |
| 2014 | $157.20 | $4,814 |
| 2015 | $175.63 | $4,308 |
| 2016 | $178.28 | $4,244 |
| 2017 | $209.36 | $3,614 |
| 2018 | $239.43 | $3,160 |
| 2019 | $247.97 | $3,052 |
| 2020 | $279.74 | $2,705 |
| 2021 | $392.31 | $1,929 |
| 2022 | $390.74 | $1,937 |
| 2023 | $402.10 | $1,882 |
| 2024 | $514.84 | $1,470 |
| 2025 | $582.71 | $1,299 |
| 2026 | $756.48 | $1,000 |
| Total | $20,000 in | $90,717 |
A quick honesty note on the date. The market is actually closed on Memorial Day, so nobody literally buys that Monday. The figures above use the May monthly close as the stand-in, which is the data this site runs on and lands within 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 2007 through 2010 are worth about $34,836 today, more than a third of the entire ending balance, off just a fifth of the contributions. The 2026 buy, made this year, is still sitting at $1,000 because it has had no time to grow. 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 $90,717 today, likely well 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 2007 at $107.93 would be worth about $140,221 today, far more than spreading it out. But that misses the point. Almost nobody has 20 years of savings sitting in cash in 2007. The Memorial Day 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 quadrupled the money.
The Bottom Line
Buying $1,000 of the S&P 500 every Memorial Day for 20 years would have turned $20,000 into about $90,717, and more than that with dividends reinvested. No timing, no stock picking, no watching the market on 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.
The same once a year idea runs on a different long weekend in the Fourth of July version or on a yearly summer bonus. For more on the index over the long run, see what $1,000 in the S&P 500 would be worth 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. You can model your own contribution plan in the calculator.