“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 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 decade-long period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2016, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Salesforce Inc (NYSE: CRM), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 01/07/2016 |
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| End date: | 01/06/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $74.30 | ||||
| End price/share: | $262.90 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 134.59 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 136.24 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.26 | ||||
| Total return: | 258.19% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.60% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $35,816.80 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.60%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $35,816.80 today (as of 01/06/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 258.19% (something to think about: how might CRM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Salesforce Inc paid investors a total of $3.26/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 1.664/share, we calculate that CRM has a current yield of approximately 0.63%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.664 against the original $74.30/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.85%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“All intelligent investing is value investing: acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.” — Charlie Munger
