“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of NVIDIA Corp (NASD: NVDA) back in 2005. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 09/26/2005 |
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| End date: | 09/25/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $0.28 | ||||
| End price/share: | $177.69 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 35,714.29 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 38,943.23 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $0.21 | ||||
| Total return: | 69,098.22% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 38.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $6,917,557.29 | ||||
The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 38.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $6,917,557.29 today (as of 09/25/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 69,098.22% (something to think about: how might NVDA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that NVIDIA Corp paid investors a total of $0.21/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 .04/share, we calculate that NVDA has a current yield of approximately 0.02%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .04 against the original $0.28/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.14%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” — Phillip Fisher
