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Investing

Missing the best days

Markets are up most of the time, but not evenly. A tiny number of explosive days do almost all the work. Sit out the wrong ones and decades of returns quietly evaporate — which is exactly what happens when people try to wait for things to “settle.”

The cliff

Wells Fargo Investment Institute ran the numbers for the S&P 500 over a 30-year window ending mid-2025. Stay fully invested, and your annualised return is 8.45%. Miss just the 10 best trading days out of ~7,500, and it drops to 5.56%. Miss 30, and you’re below inflation. Miss 50, and you’re losing money — in nominal dollars.

The visceral version is in the slider below.

Miss the best 10 days, and your $10,000 grows to $50,697 instead of $113,995.

30-year hold in the S&P 500 (Wells Fargo data, 1995–2025).

01020304050best days missed
Final balance
$50,697
Annualised return
+5.56%
Fully invested
$113,995
Lost to timing
$63,298

Why the timing instinct loses

The best days don’t sit politely between months of calm. They cluster right next to the worst days, often the next session. JP Morgan’s data shows 7 of the 10 best days in the last 20 years happened within two weeks of the 10 worst. The instinct to “wait for things to settle” puts you on the sidelines exactly when you most needed to be in.

Hartford Funds found that 76% of the market’s best days occur during a bear market or the first two months of a new bull market — the moments that feel most terrifying to hold through, let alone buy into.

Two examples

March 24, 2020. The S&P 500 jumped 9.4% — the biggest single day since 2008 — one trading day after the COVID-crash low. Anyone who sold the panic-day before missed the entire rebound.

October 13, 2008. The index surged 11.58% — at the time the largest single-day gain in its history — landing in the middle of the worst weeks of the financial crisis. Selling out in early October to “see how things shake out” meant watching the bounce from the sidelines.

What this actually means

You don’t need to predict the future to win. You just need to not be out of the market when the future happens. The math says staying boring beats getting clever, almost every time.

The same idea applies in the other direction: adding money during the worst stretches captures the rebound days that drive returns. See the compound interest calculator to model your own DCA plan.