“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a twenty year holding period for an investor who was considering Williams Cos Inc (NYSE: WMB) back in 2006, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 01/03/2006 |
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| End date: | 12/31/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $19.48 | ||||
| End price/share: | $60.11 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 513.35 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,231.79 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $25.77 | ||||
| Total return: | 640.43% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.53% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $74,104.00 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.53%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $74,104.00 today (as of 12/31/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 640.43% (something to think about: how might WMB shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Williams Cos Inc paid investors a total of $25.77/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 2/share, we calculate that WMB has a current yield of approximately 3.33%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $19.48/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.09%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The idea that a bell rings to signal when to get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.” — Jack Bogle
