“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 Expedia Group Inc (NASD: EXPE), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 10/27/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/24/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $127.11 | ||||
| End price/share: | $218.85 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 78.67 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 82.85 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.50 | ||||
| Total return: | 81.32% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.13% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,129.33 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.13%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $18,129.33 today (as of 10/24/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 81.32% (something to think about: how might EXPE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Expedia Group Inc paid investors a total of $6.50/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 EXPE has a current yield of approximately 0.73%. 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 $127.11/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.57%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“A market downturn doesn’t bother us. It is an opportunity to increase our ownership of great companies with great management at good prices.” — Warren Buffett
