What if you'd bought MCD every McDonald's run?
If you'd bought $1 of MCD every time you ate at McDonald's since May 2016 — about five visits a month — you'd have put in roughly $605 and be holding around $1,015 worth of McDonald's today.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. That's about 10% a year — almost exactly the long-run market.
The short version
- $5 a month into MCD for ~10 years became about $1,015 from $605 contributed. Money-weighted return: ~10.0% annualized, as of April 2026.
- MCD tracked the market almost perfectly. It's the boring answer. The dividend did a lot of the work.
- The journey included a 19.4% peak-to-trough drawdown in 2020, when dining rooms closed and same-store sales cratered in a single quarter.
- What this article describes hypothetically, Slyce does automatically: purchases at McDonald's trigger a fractional-share buy of MCD, receipt by receipt.
The number, set up honestly
The math: five $1 contributions a month, starting May 2016, each buying MCD at that month's adjusted close (dividends reinvested — MCD is a dividend aristocrat and the reinvested distribution is a meaningful fraction of the total return). Run 121 months. End in April 2026.
Contributed: $605. Current value: about $1,015.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. That's roughly $410 of gain on a decade of $5-a-month purchases — about a 1.7x on money spread across the whole window.
The internal rate of return on that cash-flow stream is about 10.0% 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. MCD over this specific window tracked the index almost step for step. That's worth saying plainly — the spoke isn't a winner story or a loser story. It's the median.
Why we're showing you the boring one
Worth saying: we picked MCD knowing exactly how it would come out. In 2016 you didn't know MCD was going to return about 10% a year. You hoped it would. It did. The median is the one you don't write a viral tweet about.
That's actually the spoke's point. If every article in this cluster were AMZN or NVDA — names that compounded at eye-watering rates — the calculator would read like a pick-the-winner machine. It isn't. A spend-to-own account gives you what the companies you shop at actually did. For the most ubiquitous burger chain in America, what they did was a dividend-aristocrat real-estate play masquerading as fast food. The real estate is on the corporate balance sheet; the franchise cash flow is why the dividend keeps compounding. See the spend-to-own guide for the full thesis and the counterfactual spokes that cover names that beat and trailed this one.
What Slyce actually does
You don't open the Slyce calculator to simulate this. You order the McChicken you order every Wednesday, and Slyce buys a fractional share of MCD for you on the way through.
The mechanic: you connect the card or account you pay with. Purchases at McDonald's pass through a rule that routes a small percentage — the default is 3% — into a real brokerage account in your name. The shares are MCD, not a derivative or a token. They pay the MCD dividend, vote with MCD, and 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 Starbucks version of this math or the Chipotle 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.
MCD's worst peak-to-trough decline over the window was a 19.4% drop in March 2020, when COVID closed dining rooms and same-store sales collapsed in a single quarter.[1]Based on historical returns. Past performance doesn't predict future results. On the DCA trajectory, that meant a position worth around $340 earlier in the year fell into the high $270s within weeks. Small in dollars, sharp in percent.
Unlike the longer drawdowns on growth names, MCD's 2020 bottom was brief. Drive-thru volume held up, the dividend paid on schedule, and the shares were back near their pre-pandemic highs by late summer. For a DCA account, the 2020 drop functioned as a handful of months of slightly cheaper buys before the recovery took hold. It was the only serious drawdown of the decade.
This is the part of the chart that makes MCD the "set it and forget it" of the group. The 10-year line goes up, has one visible notch, and goes up again. The lived experience was short enough that most people who held didn't notice.
Pitfalls
Three specific things to name, not just as disclaimers but as real risks to the idea of buying MCD because the calculator said it worked.
Survivorship bias. MCD 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. Restaurant chains that were large retail spenders and are now bankrupt — Krystal, Sbarro through multiple filings, Sizzler — would have been on an equivalent list over earlier windows. They aren't here now. The calculator's universe is survivor-biased by construction, even for a name as durable as MCD.
Concentration risk. The math above is one ticker. A spend-to-own account that only ever buys McDonald's ends up concentrated in McDonald's. The intended shape of a Slyce portfolio is the mixture of tickers your spending actually touches — MCD plus groceries, gas, coffee, rideshare, travel. One-ticker concentration is the tail risk; diversification comes from the breadth of the wallet, not from an asset-allocation model.
Past returns ≠ future returns. MCD compounding at 10% over the 2016–2026 window does not mean MCD compounds at 10% over the 2026–2036 window. Mature dividend-aristocrat names have periods where the dividend-plus-modest-growth story keeps delivering and periods where the real estate anchors the valuation at flat-line returns. The S&P 500's long-run ~10% tells you what diversified equity has done across many of both.[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 $1,015 number calculated? We pulled MCD's monthly adjusted closes from Yahoo Finance for the window May 2016 – April 2026, simulated $5-per-month dollar-cost averaging (five $1 purchases, matching a roughly weekly McDonald's habit for much of the year), and computed the ending portfolio value using the April 2026 close with dividends reinvested. Contributions total $605; the portfolio finished around $1,015. Re-runs will differ as the window rolls and prices move.
What was the worst moment in that decade? March 2020. MCD drew down about 19.4% from its February high in the COVID shock. A DCA account started in 2016 would have been holding roughly $280 of MCD at the trough — on about $235 contributed at that point. The account was above water in dollars, trailing in percent, and recovered within months as drive-thru volume held up.
Does this include dividends? Yes. McDonald's is a dividend aristocrat — it has raised its quarterly payout every year since 1976. The adjusted-close series we used reinvests those distributions at the month's close. For a stock like MCD with a ~2.5% yield, the reinvested dividend compounds into a real share of the total return.
Can I actually buy fractional MCD through a normal broker? Yes. Every major U.S. broker supports fractional MCD orders — you place the order in dollars and the broker computes the share fraction at execution. The mechanical capability is why spend-to-own works at all. The slyce you'd own through this product is the same fractional MCD you could open at Schwab; the difference is the trigger mechanism.
Why $1 per transaction and 5 transactions per month? Those are the defaults in the Slyce calculator for McDonald's, drawn from typical household patterns. If your actual McDonald's spend is higher or lower, run the calculator with your own numbers — it recomputes the trajectory for any contribution rate.
Does MCD really own the real estate? Most franchised locations sit on land McDonald's Corporation leases to the franchisee. Rent is a line item on the corporate income statement that's bigger than many restaurant chains' entire revenue. That's the "real-estate play masquerading as fast food" line. It's also why the dividend keeps compounding — the rent doesn't depend on any particular year's burger volume.
Next steps
If you want to run this same math against your actual spending — the chains you actually eat at, the amounts you actually spend — the Slyce calculator does it for 20 tickers at once. The ending balances matter less than the shape: how much you'd have contributed, where the drawdowns were, and how much of the total came from the dividend versus the price.
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