“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 Franklin Resources Inc (NYSE: BEN)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2005.
| Start date: | 09/22/2005 |
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| End date: | 09/19/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $27.05 | ||||
| End price/share: | $24.42 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 369.69 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 677.74 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $18.80 | ||||
| Total return: | 65.51% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.55% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,549.06 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $16,549.06 today (as of 09/19/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 65.51% (something to think about: how might BEN shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Franklin Resources Inc paid investors a total of $18.80/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 1.28/share, we calculate that BEN has a current yield of approximately 5.24%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.28 against the original $27.05/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 19.37%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If you’re prepared to invest in a company, then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won’t get bored.” — Peter Lynch
