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“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a five year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Dominos Pizza Inc. (NASD: DPZ)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.

Start date: 10/15/2020
$10,000

10/15/2020
  $11,226

10/14/2025
End date: 10/14/2025
Start price/share: $401.84
End price/share: $424.23
Starting shares: 24.89
Ending shares: 26.46
Dividends reinvested/share: $25.04
Total return: 12.26%
Average annual return: 2.34%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,226.05

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.34%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,226.05 today (as of 10/14/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 12.26% (something to think about: how might DPZ shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Dominos Pizza Inc. paid investors a total of $25.04/share in dividends over the 5 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 6.96/share, we calculate that DPZ has a current yield of approximately 1.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.96 against the original $401.84/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.41%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.” — Larry Summers