“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2021, investors considering an investment into shares of Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE: WFC) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 02/19/2021 |
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| End date: | 02/18/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $37.83 | ||||
| End price/share: | $88.56 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 264.34 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 297.17 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.55 | ||||
| Total return: | 163.18% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 21.35% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $26,314.73 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.35%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $26,314.73 today (as of 02/18/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 163.18% (something to think about: how might WFC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Wells Fargo & Co paid investors a total of $6.55/share in dividends over the 5 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 1.8/share, we calculate that WFC has a current yield of approximately 2.03%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.8 against the original $37.83/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.37%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.” — Peter Lynch
