“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) back in 2015. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 10/23/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/22/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $185.50 | ||||
| End price/share: | $744.60 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 53.91 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 66.04 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $65.95 | ||||
| Total return: | 391.74% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 17.26% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $49,190.11 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 17.26%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $49,190.11 today (as of 10/22/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 391.74% (something to think about: how might GS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Goldman Sachs Group Inc paid investors a total of $65.95/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 16/share, we calculate that GS has a current yield of approximately 2.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 16 against the original $185.50/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.16%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” — Warren Buffett
