Dollar-Cost Averaging with Yearly and Biyearly Installments

In this paper the authors considered Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) strategies with yearly and biyearly installments and compared their gross returns with those of a lump-sum investment for different medium-long term investment time horizons (between 5 and 20 years). The empirical analysis is conducted on several stock indices by means of rolling observation periods. The authors found that the average annual returns of the lump-sum investment are, in general, higher than those of the two considered DCA strategies and the percentage of observations in which the lump-sum outperforms both the considered DCA is higher for longer investment time horizons.