“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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Keurig Dr Pepper Inc (NASD: KDP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2016.
| Start date: | 02/23/2016 |
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| End date: | 02/20/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $92.09 | ||||
| End price/share: | $29.54 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 108.59 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 778.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $114.40 | ||||
| Total return: | 129.91% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 8.68% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $22,987.74 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.68%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $22,987.74 today (as of 02/20/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 129.91% (something to think about: how might KDP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Keurig Dr Pepper Inc paid investors a total of $114.40/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 .92/share, we calculate that KDP has a current yield of approximately 3.11%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .92 against the original $92.09/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.38%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If I’ve learned one thing in this life it’s this: even if you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” — Daymond John
