“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a decade-long holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY) back in 2015: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 05/28/2015 |
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| End date: | 05/27/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $93.39 | ||||
| End price/share: | $158.23 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 107.08 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 135.65 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $34.98 | ||||
| Total return: | 114.63% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.93% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $21,458.70 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.93%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $21,458.70 today (as of 05/27/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 114.63% (something to think about: how might HSY shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hershey Company paid investors a total of $34.98/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 5.48/share, we calculate that HSY has a current yield of approximately 3.46%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.48 against the original $93.39/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.70%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.” — Warren Buffett
