“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 Genuine Parts Co. (NYSE: GPC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 11/10/2015 |
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| End date: | 11/07/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $89.78 | ||||
| End price/share: | $126.66 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 111.38 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 148.32 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $32.77 | ||||
| Total return: | 87.86% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.51% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,789.01 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $18,789.01 today (as of 11/07/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 87.86% (something to think about: how might GPC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Genuine Parts Co. paid investors a total of $32.77/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 4.12/share, we calculate that GPC has a current yield of approximately 3.25%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.12 against the original $89.78/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.62%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.” — Benjamin Graham
