“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 Estee Lauder Cos., Inc. (NYSE: EL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 11/12/2015 |
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| End date: | 11/11/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $84.35 | ||||
| End price/share: | $90.84 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 118.55 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 134.63 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $18.44 | ||||
| Total return: | 22.30% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.03% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,227.19 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $12,227.19 today (as of 11/11/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 22.30% (something to think about: how might EL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Estee Lauder Cos., Inc. paid investors a total of $18.44/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 1.4/share, we calculate that EL has a current yield of approximately 1.54%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.4 against the original $84.35/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.83%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” — Woody Allen
