“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Nike (NYSE: NKE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 09/28/2015 |
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| End date: | 09/25/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $61.07 | ||||
| End price/share: | $69.24 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 163.75 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 185.26 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $10.78 | ||||
| Total return: | 28.27% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.52% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,825.84 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.52%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $12,825.84 today (as of 09/25/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 28.27% (something to think about: how might NKE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Nike paid investors a total of $10.78/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 1.6/share, we calculate that NKE has a current yield of approximately 2.31%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $61.07/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.78%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra
