Buy and hold the S&P 500: the yardstick for every strategy
Buy a fund of the 500 largest US companies once and never touch it. It is the simplest strategy there is, and most clever ones fail to beat it.
The rule
Buy an S&P 500 index fund and hold it. No signals, no selling, no rebalancing. Dividends are added to the account.
Why people use it
It costs almost nothing, takes no time and gives you the return of the US stock market itself. Decades of data show that most active strategies and most funds end up behind it once costs are counted.
Where it hurts
You sit through every crash in full. The index has fallen by a third and by half before, and it took years to recover. The hard part is not the rule but holding on when the account is deep in the red.
How our bot runs it
The bot bought the SPY fund once at the start and does nothing else. Every other stock bot on this site is compared with its account.
Live account
A virtual $100,000 account that follows this rule. Every trade is on the bot's page.
| Bot | Account | Return |
|---|---|---|
| Buy & hold S&P 500 | $99,863 | −0.14% |