“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 General Electric Co (NYSE: GE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 11/03/2015 |
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| End date: | 10/31/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $141.80 | ||||
| End price/share: | $308.95 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 70.52 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 80.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $14.61 | ||||
| Total return: | 148.10% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.52% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $24,821.39 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.52%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $24,821.39 today (as of 10/31/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 148.10% (something to think about: how might GE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that General Electric Co paid investors a total of $14.61/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 1.44/share, we calculate that GE has a current yield of approximately 0.47%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.44 against the original $141.80/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.33%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.” — Warren Buffett
