“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 two-decade period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2006, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about International Business Machines Corp (NYSE: IBM), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a two-decade holding period.
| Start date: | 02/21/2006 |
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| End date: | 02/19/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $76.96 | ||||
| End price/share: | $256.28 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 129.94 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 241.96 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $90.68 | ||||
| Total return: | 520.10% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.55% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $62,025.92 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $62,025.92 today (as of 02/19/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 520.10% (something to think about: how might IBM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that International Business Machines Corp paid investors a total of $90.68/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 6.72/share, we calculate that IBM has a current yield of approximately 2.62%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.72 against the original $76.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.40%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“We ignore outlooks and forecasts… we’re lousy at it and we admit it … everyone else is lousy too, but most people won’t admit it.” — Martin Whitman
