“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a ten year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Dominos Pizza Inc. (NASD: DPZ) back in 2015: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 11/25/2015 |
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| End date: | 11/24/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $109.15 | ||||
| End price/share: | $402.67 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 91.62 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 102.22 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $35.85 | ||||
| Total return: | 311.60% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.19% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $41,160.85 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.19%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,160.85 today (as of 11/24/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 311.60% (something to think about: how might DPZ shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Dominos Pizza Inc. paid investors a total of $35.85/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 6.96/share, we calculate that DPZ has a current yield of approximately 1.73%. 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 $109.15/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.58%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban
