“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Textron Inc (NYSE: TXT)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2005.
| Start date: | 11/03/2005 |
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| End date: | 10/31/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $37.03 | ||||
| End price/share: | $80.81 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 270.05 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 300.49 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $4.06 | ||||
| Total return: | 142.83% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.54% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $24,305.40 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.54%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $24,305.40 today (as of 10/31/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 142.83% (something to think about: how might TXT shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Textron Inc paid investors a total of $4.06/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 .08/share, we calculate that TXT has a current yield of approximately 0.10%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .08 against the original $37.03/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.27%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” — Robert Arnott
