“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 ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Automatic Data Processing Inc. (NASD: ADP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 03/16/2015 |
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| End date: | 03/13/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $87.35 | ||||
| End price/share: | $290.55 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 114.48 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 141.61 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $34.84 | ||||
| Total return: | 311.45% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.19% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $41,128.97 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.19%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,128.97 today (as of 03/13/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 311.45% (something to think about: how might ADP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Automatic Data Processing Inc. paid investors a total of $34.84/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 6.16/share, we calculate that ADP has a current yield of approximately 2.12%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.16 against the original $87.35/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.43%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.” — Warren Buffett
