“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Regions Financial Corp (NYSE: RF)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2005.
| Start date: | 08/01/2005 |
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| End date: | 07/30/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $33.63 | ||||
| End price/share: | $25.70 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 297.35 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 549.97 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.27 | ||||
| Total return: | 41.34% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 1.74% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $14,122.00 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 1.74%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $14,122.00 today (as of 07/30/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 41.34% (something to think about: how might RF shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Regions Financial Corp paid investors a total of $11.27/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 1.06/share, we calculate that RF has a current yield of approximately 4.12%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.06 against the original $33.63/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 12.25%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.” — Jawaharlal Nehru
