“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a ten year holding period for an investor who was considering Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) back in 2015, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 07/20/2015 |
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| End date: | 07/17/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $212.39 | ||||
| End price/share: | $705.84 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 47.08 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 57.57 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $62.60 | ||||
| Total return: | 306.35% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.05% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $40,631.82 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.05%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $40,631.82 today (as of 07/17/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 306.35% (something to think about: how might GS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Goldman Sachs Group Inc paid investors a total of $62.60/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 12/share, we calculate that GS has a current yield of approximately 1.70%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 12 against the original $212.39/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.80%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban
