“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 decade-long period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2015, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Prologis Inc (NYSE: PLD), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 08/13/2015 |
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| End date: | 08/12/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $41.25 | ||||
| End price/share: | $104.81 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 242.42 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 323.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $25.62 | ||||
| Total return: | 239.44% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.99% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $33,938.35 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.99%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $33,938.35 today (as of 08/12/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 239.44% (something to think about: how might PLD shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Prologis Inc paid investors a total of $25.62/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 4.04/share, we calculate that PLD has a current yield of approximately 3.85%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.04 against the original $41.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.33%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions.” — Joel Greenblatt
