“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 Halliburton Company (NYSE: HAL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 09/21/2015 |
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| End date: | 09/18/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $37.45 | ||||
| End price/share: | $22.36 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 267.02 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 323.83 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.87 | ||||
| Total return: | -27.59% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -3.18% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $7,238.54 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -3.18%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $7,238.54 today (as of 09/18/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -27.59% (something to think about: how might HAL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Halliburton Company paid investors a total of $5.87/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 .68/share, we calculate that HAL has a current yield of approximately 3.04%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .68 against the original $37.45/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.12%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Every once in a while, the market does something so stupid it takes your breath away.” — Jim Cramer
