“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 2006, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Sysco Corp (NYSE: SYY), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a two-decade holding period.
| Start date: | 01/09/2006 |
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| End date: | 01/08/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $31.39 | ||||
| End price/share: | $74.27 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 318.57 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 567.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $27.47 | ||||
| Total return: | 321.75% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.46% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $42,196.76 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.46%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $42,196.76 today (as of 01/08/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 321.75% (something to think about: how might SYY shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Sysco Corp paid investors a total of $27.47/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 2.16/share, we calculate that SYY has a current yield of approximately 2.91%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.16 against the original $31.39/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.27%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“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
