“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Broadcom Inc (NASD: AVGO) back in 2020: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 09/11/2020 |
|
|||
| End date: | 09/10/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $35.97 | ||||
| End price/share: | $369.57 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 278.01 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 313.24 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.12 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,057.66% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 63.20% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $115,771.26 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 63.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $115,771.26 today (as of 09/10/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,057.66% (something to think about: how might AVGO shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Broadcom Inc paid investors a total of $9.12/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 2.36/share, we calculate that AVGO has a current yield of approximately 0.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.36 against the original $35.97/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.78%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“I make no attempt to forecast the market; my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.” — Warren Buffett
