“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 Intel Corp (NASD: INTC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 10/29/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/28/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $34.03 | ||||
| End price/share: | $41.53 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 293.86 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 374.39 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $10.11 | ||||
| Total return: | 55.48% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.51% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $15,548.32 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $15,548.32 today (as of 10/28/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 55.48% (something to think about: how might INTC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Intel Corp paid investors a total of $10.11/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 .5/share, we calculate that INTC has a current yield of approximately 1.20%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .5 against the original $34.03/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.53%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.” — Peter Lynch
