If You Bought Amazon.com In 2020, Here’s The Investment Outcome

— Warren Buffett

Such a great quote from Warren Buffett, highlighting the importance of investment time horizon when considering making an investment. In the short run, who knows what the stock market will do? A week or two after buying any given stock, could the entire stock market fall out of bed? Quite possibly! Should that happen, how would you react? It is an excellent question to think about before hitting the buy button.

For investors who take a multi-year time horizon, the important thing is not what happens in the next week or two, but what the result will be over the long haul. Today, we look at the result investors of the year 2020 experienced, who considered an investment in shares of Amazon.com Inc (NASD: AMZN) and decided upon a five year investment time horizon.

AMZN 5-Year Return Details
Start date:	04/15/2020	$10,000 04/15/2020 $15,785 04/14/2025
End date:	04/14/2025
Start price/share:	$115.38
End price/share:	$182.12
Starting shares:	86.67
Ending shares:	86.67
Dividends reinvested/share:	$0.00
Total return:	57.84%
Average annual return:	9.56%
Starting investment:	$10,000.00
Ending investment:	$15,785.56

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.56%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $15,785.56 today (as of 04/14/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 57.84% (something to think about: how might AMZN shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply…and they can’t predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack.” — Peter Lynch