“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 ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 10/09/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/08/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $77.33 | ||||
| End price/share: | $323.82 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 129.32 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 148.89 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $18.33 | ||||
| Total return: | 382.13% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 17.03% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $48,233.22 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 17.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $48,233.22 today (as of 10/08/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 382.13% (something to think about: how might AXP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Express Co. paid investors a total of $18.33/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 3.28/share, we calculate that AXP has a current yield of approximately 1.01%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.28 against the original $77.33/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.31%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.” — Benjamin Graham
