US large caps with consistent dividends. Lower volatility.
Prices as of 2026-10-23. Source: Data via FinanceDataReader · Policy rate via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
SCHD is Charles Schwab's US dividend ETF, launched in October 2011. It holds about a hundred companies with at least ten years of steady dividends and solid balance sheets. Its fee is very low and it has long been popular with dividend-growth investors.
Technology weighs little while consumer staples, health care, energy and financials weigh more, so it tends to trail the S&P 500 in tech-led markets and to fall less in years when tech is weak. Prices on this page are dividend-adjusted, so results approximate reinvested dividends. Taxes are not included.
Its daily moves are among the smallest on this site, so split-buying settings built for leveraged funds barely trigger any buys. Lower the trigger and adjust the take-profit target and time cut together. A rule of thumb for matching the time cut to a ticker is at the end of why use a time cut.
Using real closing prices only (adjusted for splits and dividends) from 2011-10-20, SCHD's worst peak-to-trough fall was -33.4%, from the 2020-01-23 high to the 2020-03-23 low over 41 trading days. It took another 161 trading days (about 0.6 years) to get back above that high, on 2020-11-09. The last close is 0.4% below the all-time high.
A fall of 33.4% needs a 50% gain to get back to even. Any strategy on SCHD has to be judged on whether you could have held it through a stretch like this. Why drawdown comes before return.
The standard deviation of daily returns is 0.97% over the whole history
and 0.72% over the last year. By the rough rule
days ≈ (target ÷ daily volatility)², a 1.5% take-profit target needs about
4.4 trading days at the recent pace.
Where the rule comes from.
Three preset strategies run over 2016-01-04 to 2026-10-23 with a $10,000 seed and 0.1% fees, alongside simply holding the same instrument.
| Strategy | Return | Max drawdown | CAGR | Trades | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A2 Standard, base rules (no defence signal) | +30.63% | -21.41% | +2.51% | 1197 | 43.1% |
| A1 Defensive, base rules | +0.09% | -19.52% | +0.01% | 1215 | 81.8% |
| A3 Aggressive, base rules (no defence signal) | +52.05% | -23.47% | +3.96% | 1047 | 40.4% |
| Buy and hold | +176.97% | -33.36% | +9.91% | - | - |
Read the drawdown column before the return column. Split buying leaves much of the seed in cash, which is the main reason its drawdown is smaller — treat it as lower exposure rather than protection.
Test SCHD with your own settings →The standard (diamond) preset, one calendar year at a time. A strategy worth using should have good years and bad years mixed — if one year made everything, that was the year, not the rules.
| Year | Strategy | Strategy MDD | Buy and hold | B&H MDD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | +5.22% | -6.52% | +26.92% | -7.61% |
| 2025 | +2.15% | -10.99% | +0.42% | -14.77% |
| 2024 | +1.76% | -8.12% | +6.64% | -8.79% |
| 2023 | -5.22% | -13.90% | +0.71% | -14.25% |
| 2022 | -4.05% | -12.61% | -6.69% | -18.88% |
| 2021 | +7.91% | -4.59% | +27.52% | -4.98% |
| 2020 | +11.85% | -13.85% | +10.23% | -33.36% |
| 2019 | +2.01% | -6.78% | +23.06% | -8.68% |
| 2018 | -11.22% | -17.18% | -8.66% | -18.94% |
| 2017 | +4.30% | -2.05% | +16.59% | -2.69% |
Across these 10 years the strategy beat buy and hold in 3 and trailed it in 7. It lost money in 3 years; buy and hold lost in 2. In SCHD's worst year here, 2018, holding returned -8.7% while the strategy returned -11.2%. In its best year, 2021, holding returned +27.5% and the strategy +7.9%. Giving up much of the best years is the price of the smaller drawdowns.
SCHD listed in 2011-10. Nothing before that date exists, so any claim about how it would have behaved in an earlier crisis is guesswork. For older periods, test a 1x index ETF instead.
Whole shares only. If a tranche is allocated less than one share's price, it buys nothing. Raise the seed or lower the number of tranches.
The Today's Orders page computes the next session's buy limit and each tranche's sell target from your start date. It is a calculation, not advice, and no orders are placed.