“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 two-decade period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2005, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Fidelity National Information Services Inc (NYSE: FIS), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a two-decade holding period.
| Start date: | 12/09/2005 |
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| End date: | 12/08/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $40.02 | ||||
| End price/share: | $65.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 249.88 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 663.63 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $39.62 | ||||
| Total return: | 337.20% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $43,715.10 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $43,715.10 today (as of 12/08/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 337.20% (something to think about: how might FIS shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Fidelity National Information Services Inc paid investors a total of $39.62/share in dividends over the 20 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 FIS has a current yield of approximately 2.43%. 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 $40.02/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.07%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“As long as you enjoy investing, you’ll be willing to do the homework and stay in the game.” — Jim Cramer
