“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Tractor Supply Co. (NASD: TSCO) back in 2015. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 08/17/2015 |
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| End date: | 08/14/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $18.79 | ||||
| End price/share: | $59.69 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 532.20 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 615.61 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $4.56 | ||||
| Total return: | 267.46% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.90% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $36,748.30 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.90%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $36,748.30 today (as of 08/14/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 267.46% (something to think about: how might TSCO shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Tractor Supply Co. paid investors a total of $4.56/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 .92/share, we calculate that TSCO has a current yield of approximately 1.54%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .92 against the original $18.79/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.20%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra
