“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 Synchrony Financial (NYSE: SYF)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 12/09/2015 |
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| End date: | 12/08/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $30.61 | ||||
| End price/share: | $79.78 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 326.69 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 410.06 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.17 | ||||
| Total return: | 227.15% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.58% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $32,726.11 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.58%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $32,726.11 today (as of 12/08/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 227.15% (something to think about: how might SYF shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Synchrony Financial paid investors a total of $8.17/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 1.2/share, we calculate that SYF has a current yield of approximately 1.50%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.2 against the original $30.61/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.90%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” — Seth Klarman
