“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into WEC Energy Group Inc (NYSE: WEC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 11/20/2015 |
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| End date: | 11/19/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $50.51 | ||||
| End price/share: | $110.16 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 197.98 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 273.44 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $26.82 | ||||
| Total return: | 201.22% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $30,119.62 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $30,119.62 today (as of 11/19/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 201.22% (something to think about: how might WEC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that WEC Energy Group Inc paid investors a total of $26.82/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 3.57/share, we calculate that WEC has a current yield of approximately 3.24%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.57 against the original $50.51/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.41%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he is wrong.” — Bernard Baruch
