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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Molson Coors Beverage Co (NYSE: TAP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 02/06/2015
$10,000

02/06/2015
  $8,693

02/05/2025
End date: 02/05/2025
Start price/share: $77.16
End price/share: $53.28
Starting shares: 129.60
Ending shares: 163.13
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.69
Total return: -13.08%
Average annual return: -1.39%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,693.13

As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -1.39%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $8,693.13 today (as of 02/05/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -13.08% (something to think about: how might TAP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Molson Coors Beverage Co paid investors a total of $14.69/share in dividends over the 10 holding period, marking a second component of the total return beyond share price change alone. Much like watering a tree, reinvesting dividends can help an investment to grow over time — for the above calculations we assume dividend reinvestment (and for this exercise the closing price on ex-date is used for the reinvestment of a given dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.76/share, we calculate that TAP has a current yield of approximately 3.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.76 against the original $77.16/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.28%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If you don’t study any companies, you have the same success buying stocks as you do in a poker game if you bet without looking at your cards.” — Peter Lynch