“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 DuPont (NYSE: DD)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 10/08/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/07/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $101.14 | ||||
| End price/share: | $78.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 98.87 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 123.99 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $21.42 | ||||
| Total return: | -2.19% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.22% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,782.05 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.22%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $9,782.05 today (as of 10/07/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -2.19% (something to think about: how might DD shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that DuPont paid investors a total of $21.42/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 1.64/share, we calculate that DD has a current yield of approximately 2.08%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.64 against the original $101.14/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.06%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — John Maynard Keynes
