What if you'd bought HD on every Home Depot run?
If you'd bought $1 of HD every time you ran to Home Depot since May 2016 — roughly three trips a month — you'd have put in about $363 and be holding around $596 worth of Home Depot today.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. That's a money-weighted return near 9.6% per year. It's also, worth saying, a pick in hindsight — and the most "normal" one on this page.
The short version
- $3 a month into HD for ~10 years became about $596 from $363 contributed. Money-weighted return: roughly 9.6% annualized, as of April 2026 — close to the S&P 500's long-run rate.
- HD is the blue-chip version of this math. Steady compounder, real dividend, not a moonshot and not a wreck.
- The journey included a 29.8% peak-to-trough drawdown in 2022, when the rate-driven housing slowdown hit home improvement. A position worth ~$400 fell to around $280 before recovering.
- What this article describes hypothetically, Slyce does automatically: purchases at Home Depot trigger a fractional-share buy of HD, receipt by receipt.
The number, set up honestly
The math: three $1 contributions a month, starting May 2016, each buying HD at that month's adjusted close. Home Depot pays a meaningful quarterly dividend, and the adjusted-close series we used treats dividends as reinvested on the ex-date — standard for total-return comparisons. Run 121 months. End in April 2026.
Contributed: $363. Current value: about $596.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. That's roughly $233 of gain on a decade of $3-a-month purchases — a 1.64x on money that was spread across the whole window, not dropped in at the start.
The internal rate of return on that cash-flow stream is about 9.6% per year.Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. For scale: the S&P 500 has historically returned roughly 10% per year nominal since 1957.[2]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. HD over this specific window tracked the index closely — slightly below on price return, roughly in line once the dividend is reinvested. It is, in a word this guide tries to avoid, boring. That's the feature.
Why we're showing you a market-tracker
Most "what if you'd bought" articles you find online are written about winners, because winners produce the most Google-bait numbers. HD is here because the Slyce mechanic is not about winners. It's about the shape of a portfolio that mirrors how a household actually spends — and a lot of that spending goes to large, mature, dividend-paying retailers that compound roughly in line with the index. HD is what that looks like on the math.
Worth saying plainly: we picked HD in hindsight — though "hindsight" does less work here than it does for, say, Tesla. HD in 2016 was already a 35-year-old public company with a track record. The risk was not "will this ever be a business" but "will consumer home-improvement spending keep growing." It did. The same analysis run on a stock we now know underperformed — DIS, say, or NKE — ends with less money than was put in.
The reason this cluster exists is not to recommend HD. It's to explain the mechanic: if you had a system that captured a slyce of whatever you happened to buy, the portfolio would reflect your spending. Some of those slyces would be winners. Some would be losers. Some, like HD, would just track along. The spread is the point, not the pick. See the spend-to-own guide for the full thesis and the counterfactual cases the pillar covers.
What Slyce actually does
You don't open the Slyce calculator to simulate this. You shop at Home Depot the way you already shop at Home Depot — two drill bits and some lumber on a Saturday, a new faucet the Tuesday after that — and Slyce buys a fractional share of HD for you on the way through.
The mechanic: you connect the card or account you pay with. Purchases at Home Depot pass through a rule that routes a small percentage (the default is 3%) into a real brokerage account in your name. The shares are HD, not a derivative or a token. They pay HD's dividend, they vote with HD, and they sell on any normal brokerage execution. Your Slyces tracks the holding; The Feed tracks the receipts.
The point of doing this automatically is the same point as the Costco version of this math or the Walmart version of this math: the capture happens at the moment of purchase, not in a separate ritual that most people never get around to.
The shape of the return
The ending balance is the story the article opens with. The drawdown is the part that would have made you quit.
HD's worst peak-to-trough decline over the window was about 29.8% in 2022, when the Fed's rate-hiking cycle cooled the housing market and the "everyone renovated during COVID" backlog started to empty out.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. On the DCA trajectory, that meant watching a position worth roughly $400 in late 2021 fall to around $280 by the autumn of 2022. On about $225 contributed at that point, the account was still in positive territory — one of the quieter drawdowns in the Slyce-calculator set.
It came back. By 2024, HD had cleared its late-2021 high, and it has compounded through 2025 and into 2026 alongside a gradual recovery in housing turnover. The 1.64x ending multiple is contingent on staying through the 30% drawdown and the flat stretch that followed — which, compared to the 67% ride on TSLA or the 46% on AMZN, was a much easier stretch to hold.
This is the part every historical-return article needs, even when the drawdown was mild. A quarter of the value erased on paper is real money on paper. For an account measured in the low hundreds, it was a matter of watching gains disappear, not watching contributions disappear.
Pitfalls
Three specific things to name, not just as disclaimers but as real risks to the idea of buying HD because the calculator said it worked.
Survivorship bias. HD is one of the 20 tickers in the Slyce calculator's pre-built set. That set is drawn from companies that are still publicly traded and still relevant to retail spending. The home-improvement and hardware category used to be much wider — regional chains, national competitors, category-killer big-box names that are now gone or much smaller. The calculator's universe is survivor-biased by construction, and any historical-return story drawn from it inherits the bias.
Concentration risk, even on a blue chip. The math above is one ticker. A spend-to-own account that captures only Home Depot trips ends up concentrated in HD. Blue-chip concentration is less explosive than mega-cap-growth concentration, but it's still concentration. The intended shape of a Slyce portfolio is the mixture of tickers your spending actually touches — HD plus whatever groceries, gas, online orders, and travel you buy.
Past returns ≠ future returns. HD compounding at 9.6% over the 2016–2026 window does not mean HD compounds at 9.6% over the 2026–2036 window. The past decade included a once-in-a-generation home-improvement boom during COVID. The next decade might not. The S&P 500's long-run ~10% tells you what diversified equity has done across many kinds of windows.[2]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results.
For the custodial version of this — running the same mechanic inside a kid's account that also qualifies for the federal program — see the Trump Accounts guide.
FAQ
How was the $596 number calculated? We pulled HD's monthly adjusted closes from Yahoo Finance for the window May 2016 – April 2026, simulated $3-per-month dollar-cost averaging (three $1 purchases, matching a typical household's Home Depot visit rate), and computed the ending portfolio value using the April 2026 close. The adjusted-close series treats dividends as reinvested on the ex-date. Contributions total $363; the portfolio finished around $596.
What was the worst moment in that decade? Autumn 2022. HD drew down about 30% from its late-2021 peak as mortgage rates roughly tripled and housing turnover slowed sharply. A DCA account started in 2016 would have been holding roughly $280 at the trough on about $225 contributed at that point — still above water, but the cushion was thin.
Does this include dividends? Yes. HD pays a quarterly dividend; our adjusted-close series treats those dividends as reinvested. That accounts for a meaningful share of the total return over a decade — HD has paid an uninterrupted dividend since 1987 and raises it most years.
Can I buy fractional HD through a normal broker? Yes. Every major U.S. broker supports fractional HD orders — you place the order in dollars and the broker computes the share fraction at execution. The dividend on a fractional share pays proportionally; a $200 position at a ~2.5% yield generates about $5 a year in dividends, paid quarterly.
Why $3 per month? That's the default in the Slyce calculator for Home Depot, drawn from typical household shopping patterns. If you're a contractor or an aggressive renovator, your actual HD spend is higher; run the calculator with your own contribution rate.
Is HD a "safe" way to do this? No stock is safe. HD has drawn down 30% in the window we covered and will draw down again at some point. "Blue chip" means "large, mature, established" — it does not mean "immune to losses." The voice of this guide tries to avoid the word "safe" for a reason.
Next steps
If you want to run this same math against your actual spending — the stores you actually shop at, the amounts you actually spend — the Slyce calculator does it for 20 tickers at once. The ending balances are less interesting than the shape: how much you'd have contributed, where the drawdowns were, and how much of the ending balance came from a handful of winners versus a broad spread across your wallet.
If you want to skip the modeling and sign up for the product, that's the home page and the waitlist below.
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Published Apr 14, 2026 · Updated Apr 14, 2026