“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 ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Stanley Black & Decker Inc (NYSE: SWK)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 09/30/2015 |
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| End date: | 09/29/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $96.98 | ||||
| End price/share: | $73.90 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 103.11 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 132.61 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.40 | ||||
| Total return: | -2.00% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.20% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,801.68 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $9,801.68 today (as of 09/29/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -2.00% (something to think about: how might SWK shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Stanley Black & Decker Inc paid investors a total of $28.40/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 SWK has a current yield of approximately 4.49%. 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 $96.98/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.63%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it’s doing.” — Peter Lynch
