“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 ten year holding period for an investor who was considering AFLAC Inc (NYSE: AFL) back in 2016, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 02/25/2016 |
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| End date: | 02/24/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $30.17 | ||||
| End price/share: | $112.46 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 331.46 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 418.40 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $14.27 | ||||
| Total return: | 370.53% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.74% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $47,050.61 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.74%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $47,050.61 today (as of 02/24/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 370.53% (something to think about: how might AFL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that AFLAC Inc paid investors a total of $14.27/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 2.44/share, we calculate that AFL has a current yield of approximately 2.17%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.44 against the original $30.17/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.19%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that’s when the market is in the best possible hands.” — Victor Niederhoffer
