“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2006.
| Start date: | 02/06/2006 |
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| End date: | 02/05/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $47.84 | ||||
| End price/share: | $104.98 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 209.03 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 408.63 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $43.25 | ||||
| Total return: | 328.98% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.55% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $42,909.62 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $42,909.62 today (as of 02/05/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 328.98% (something to think about: how might COP shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that ConocoPhillips paid investors a total of $43.25/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 3.36/share, we calculate that COP has a current yield of approximately 3.20%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.36 against the original $47.84/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.69%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“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
