“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 ten year 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 Alliant Energy Corp (NASD: LNT), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 07/23/2015 |
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| End date: | 07/22/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $29.59 | ||||
| End price/share: | $65.74 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 337.95 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 464.48 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $15.34 | ||||
| Total return: | 205.35% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.80% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $30,526.95 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.80%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $30,526.95 today (as of 07/22/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 205.35% (something to think about: how might LNT shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Alliant Energy Corp paid investors a total of $15.34/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 2.03/share, we calculate that LNT has a current yield of approximately 3.09%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.03 against the original $29.59/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.44%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.” — John Maynard Keynes
