Snapshots of Dollar-Cost Averaging or Lump-Sum Investing in the Retirement Portfolio? Answering the Question Utilizing Four Decades of Standard & Poor’s 500 Index Performance

Quickly apply original, key PMR-published papers with Snapshots—a short article companion that distills PMR research into compressed, digestible takeaways, so you can put the paper’s core ideas to work in your investment process—fast. This Snapshot article is based on research arguing that lump-sum investing (LSI) produced higher terminal retirement balances in two 20-year S&P 500 samples, although dollar-cost averaging (DCA) had higher internal rates of return with non-interest-bearing cash funding in 2002–2021.