“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— 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 five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2020, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 11/19/2020 |
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| End date: | 11/18/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $149.40 | ||||
| End price/share: | $182.93 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 66.93 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 75.80 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $23.50 | ||||
| Total return: | 38.65% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.75% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $13,862.43 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.75%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $13,862.43 today (as of 11/18/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 38.65% (something to think about: how might HSY shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hershey Company paid investors a total of $23.50/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 5.48/share, we calculate that HSY has a current yield of approximately 3.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.48 against the original $149.40/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.01%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.” — Peter Lynch
