“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a two-decade holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Automatic Data Processing Inc. (NASD: ADP) back in 2005. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 07/11/2005 |
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| End date: | 07/10/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $33.61 | ||||
| End price/share: | $305.82 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 297.53 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 479.43 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $49.61 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,366.20% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 14.36% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $146,595.81 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $146,595.81 today (as of 07/10/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,366.20% (something to think about: how might ADP shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Automatic Data Processing Inc. paid investors a total of $49.61/share in dividends over the 20 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 2.01%. 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 $33.61/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.98%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Never test the depth of a river with both feet.” — Warren Buffett
