“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 Digital Realty Trust Inc (NYSE: DLR)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 12/21/2015 |
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| End date: | 12/18/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $75.19 | ||||
| End price/share: | $147.93 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 133.00 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 188.56 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $44.24 | ||||
| Total return: | 178.94% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.80% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $27,886.73 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.80%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $27,886.73 today (as of 12/18/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 178.94% (something to think about: how might DLR shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Digital Realty Trust Inc paid investors a total of $44.24/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 4.88/share, we calculate that DLR has a current yield of approximately 3.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.88 against the original $75.19/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.39%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Every once in a while, the market does something so stupid it takes your breath away.” — Jim Cramer
