“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Eastman Chemical Co (NYSE: EMN)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 08/28/2015 |
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| End date: | 08/27/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $72.71 | ||||
| End price/share: | $68.83 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 137.53 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 187.30 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $26.33 | ||||
| Total return: | 28.92% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.57% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,890.33 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $12,890.33 today (as of 08/27/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 28.92% (something to think about: how might EMN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Eastman Chemical Co paid investors a total of $26.33/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 3.32/share, we calculate that EMN has a current yield of approximately 4.82%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.32 against the original $72.71/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.63%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.” — Benjamin Graham
