The S&P 500 rose 9.5% in the first half of 2026 on a price-only basis and nearly 10.2% with dividends reinvested. That is close to the index's full-year historical average, achieved in half the time — but the Motley Fool's Reuben Gregg Brewer says six months of returns say nothing about what the rest of the year holds.
The S&P 500 index advanced 9.5% in the first six months of 2026 on a price-only basis and nearly 10.2% with dividends reinvested, matching in half a year the roughly 10% annual return investors typically expect. But that fast start does not tell investors much about what comes next.
Six months reveals nothing about the rest of the year
The market's history includes both bull and bear markets, and a bear market is defined as a 20% decline, against a bull market's 20% gain. Those swings run far larger than a 9.5% half-year move, and they show the index does not climb at a steady, comfortable pace. As a result, six months of market returns tell investors nothing about what the future holds, since bear and bull phases never start or end on a fixed calendar date.
A record built on holding through the crashes
Buying and holding the index has still rewarded patient investors. Since the turn of the century, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF is up roughly 400% on a price-only basis, with reinvested dividends pushing the total return to just over 700%. That stretch, however, included the dot-com crash, the Great Recession, and the global COVID pandemic — each marked by a bear market that investors had to sit through before the next recovery began.
Brewer's conclusion is that the S&P 500's long history offers guidance, not certainty: buying and reinvesting dividends is a powerful long-term strategy, but only for investors willing to stay in through both the good stretches and the bad ones.
Source: The Motley Fool
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