$100 a Month Into Silver for 20 Years — Here's What Happened
I ran the actual numbers on what $100 a month would get you in gold, silver, and the S&P 500 — across four different time windows, using real monthly historical prices, with dividends reinvested on the stock side. The results surprised me.
$100 a month. No lump sums, no trying to time the market, no watching charts — just 100 bucks on the first of every month, no matter what.
I ran the actual numbers on what that would look like for gold, silver, and the S&P 500 across four different time windows. Real monthly historical prices. Dividends reinvested on the stock side. The results are not what most people expect.
How the Numbers Work
Each month’s purchase was made at the actual price that month. If silver was $17 an ounce in 2016, that’s what you paid. If it was $12 during the COVID crash in 2020, you paid $12. All those ounces accumulated over time at their real historical cost.
At the end — the end of April 2026 — everything gets valued at current prices: gold around $4,700, silver around $75, the S&P 500 around 5,700.
On the stock side, I’m including dividend reinvestment because that’s the honest comparison. Over longer windows it adds meaningfully to the S&P total, and leaving it out tilts the comparison unfairly.
What I’m not including is premiums on physical metals. In the real world you’d pay a few percent over spot when you buy. Keep that in mind — it shaves the metals numbers down slightly.
1 Year: $1,200 In
Silver: +19% to $1,430
Gold: +13%
S&P 500: +1%
Silver wins the one-year window, and it’s not close. 2025 was an extraordinary year for silver specifically — it ended the year up over 140%, its biggest annual gain since 1979. Dollar-cost averaging through that run meant capturing a lot of the move as the price climbed month by month.
The S&P 500 had a volatile year. A sharp drop in spring over tariff fears, followed by a strong recovery. If you were DCA-ing through that, you basically ended up flat.
5 Years: $6,000 In
Silver: +152% → ~$15,100
Gold: +98%
S&P 500: +24%
Silver more than doubled your money. Gold nearly doubled. The S&P gained about a quarter.
This surprises people. 2023 and 2024 were strong years for stocks — both up over 25% — but the 2022 drawdown of nearly 20% hurt the DCA position. Metals, meanwhile, went on a sustained run. Gold moved from around $1,800 in early 2021 to $4,700 today. Silver moved from the low $20s to $75. When you’re consistently buying into an asset that rises that much, the early cheap purchases carry enormous weight.
10 Years: $12,000 In
Silver: +234%
Gold: +163%
S&P 500: +73%
Silver more than tripled. Gold more than doubled. The S&P nearly doubled.
The 10-year window starts back in 2016, catching the entire metals bull market that followed. You were buying silver at $17 in 2016, $15 in 2018, $12 during the COVID crash. Those cheap ounces are now worth $75 each. That’s the best-case scenario for DCA into a volatile asset — accumulate heavily at depressed prices, wait for the asset to recover and then some.
20 Years: $24,000 In
Silver: ~$88,000
S&P 500 (with dividends): ~$85,000
Gold: ~$82,000
This is where it gets interesting. Over 20 years of consistent $100/month contributions, all three ended up within about $6,000 of each other.
I did not expect that when I started building this. The conventional wisdom is that stocks always win over the long run and precious metals are dead money because they don’t produce anything. The 20-year data says something different. Silver came out slightly ahead of the S&P 500 even including reinvested dividends, and all three roughly quadrupled a $24,000 investment.
The difference between silver and gold — about $6,000 on $24,000 invested — is within the margin of error on premium costs alone. If you dollar-cost averaged into silver starting in 2006 and never looked at the price, you’d be sitting on roughly 1,182 ounces worth about $88,000 today.
What to Make of This
Time horizon matters enormously. Metals can look terrible on a 2-3 year view and extraordinary in another 2-year window. The 5- and 10-year results here look incredible partly because they start before a major run and end at current elevated prices. That’s not cherry-picking — it’s just the nature of a volatile asset. Which is exactly why DCA is the right approach for them.
The S&P with dividends is a tougher competitor than most metals comparisons acknowledge. A lot of gold/silver vs. stocks comparisons quietly leave out dividends. That’s not an honest comparison. Count the dividends — and note that you’ll owe taxes on them depending on your account type.
Holding all three is probably better than picking one. The 20-year chart shows three assets that produced similar returns but got there through completely different paths. When stocks crashed in 2008, gold was up. When silver collapsed in 2012, equities were recovering. They don’t move together. That’s the whole point of a small metals allocation — not that it will beat stocks, but that it will cushion you when stocks don’t.
My Actual Approach
The majority of my money sits in index funds — total market, low fees, boring on purpose. That’s the core.
On top of that I’m adding a small physical metals position, targeting about 5% of net worth right now. Not because I think silver is going to $500. Because over 20 years the data shows it holds its own, it moves differently from stocks, and there’s something to be said for owning real assets that exist outside the financial system entirely.
The $100 a month is literally how I think about my metals purchases. Consistent, automatic, boring — just adding ounces. Your number might be different. $50 a month, $20 a month. The amount matters less than staying consistent.