“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a decade-long period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2015, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Visa Inc (NYSE: V), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 07/15/2015 |
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| End date: | 07/14/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $70.02 | ||||
| End price/share: | $350.50 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 142.82 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 153.13 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $12.79 | ||||
| Total return: | 436.71% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.29% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $53,688.35 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.29%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $53,688.35 today (as of 07/14/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 436.71% (something to think about: how might V shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Visa Inc paid investors a total of $12.79/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 2.36/share, we calculate that V has a current yield of approximately 0.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.36 against the original $70.02/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.96%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” — Phillip Fisher
