“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Iron Mountain Inc (NYSE: IRM) back in 2015. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 12/31/2015 |
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| End date: | 12/30/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $27.01 | ||||
| End price/share: | $83.36 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 370.23 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 646.37 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $24.98 | ||||
| Total return: | 438.82% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.33% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $53,870.27 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.33%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $53,870.27 today (as of 12/30/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 438.82% (something to think about: how might IRM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Iron Mountain Inc paid investors a total of $24.98/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 3.456/share, we calculate that IRM has a current yield of approximately 4.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.456 against the original $27.01/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 15.36%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The right time for a company to finance its growth is not when it needs capital, but rather when the market is most receptive to providing capital.” — Michael Milken
