“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 Ameren Corp (NYSE: AEE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2016.
| Start date: | 02/10/2016 |
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| End date: | 02/09/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $46.20 | ||||
| End price/share: | $104.26 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 216.45 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 290.47 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $21.86 | ||||
| Total return: | 202.85% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.71% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $30,281.96 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.71%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $30,281.96 today (as of 02/09/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 202.85% (something to think about: how might AEE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ameren Corp paid investors a total of $21.86/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 2.84/share, we calculate that AEE has a current yield of approximately 2.72%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.84 against the original $46.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.89%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.” — William O’Neil
