“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a twenty year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2005, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Intuit Inc (NASD: INTU), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a twenty year holding period.
| Start date: | 11/03/2005 |
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| End date: | 10/31/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $23.94 | ||||
| End price/share: | $667.55 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 417.71 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 473.18 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.32 | ||||
| Total return: | 3,058.72% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.84% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $315,833.53 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.84%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $315,833.53 today (as of 10/31/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 3,058.72% (something to think about: how might INTU shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Intuit Inc paid investors a total of $28.32/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 4.8/share, we calculate that INTU has a current yield of approximately 0.72%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.8 against the original $23.94/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.01%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“While some might mistakenly consider value investing a mechanical tool for identifying bargains, it is actually a comprehensive investment philosophy that emphasizes the need to perform in-depth fundamental analysis, pursue long-term investment results, limit risk, and resist crowd psychology.” — Seth Klarman
