“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a ten year holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 10 years to 2015, investors considering an investment into shares of Deere & Co. (NYSE: DE) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full ten year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 10/12/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/09/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $78.43 | ||||
| End price/share: | $456.22 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 127.50 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 151.09 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $38.84 | ||||
| Total return: | 589.31% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 21.29% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $68,904.88 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.29%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $68,904.88 today (as of 10/09/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 589.31% (something to think about: how might DE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Deere & Co. paid investors a total of $38.84/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 6.48/share, we calculate that DE has a current yield of approximately 1.42%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.48 against the original $78.43/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.81%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.” — Charlie Munger
