Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 Omnicom Group, Inc. (NYSE: OMC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2016.

Start date: 01/21/2016
$10,000

01/21/2016
  $16,000

01/20/2026
End date: 01/20/2026
Start price/share: $68.65
End price/share: $78.03
Starting shares: 145.67
Ending shares: 205.01
Dividends reinvested/share: $26.10
Total return: 59.97%
Average annual return: 4.81%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $16,000.70

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.81%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $16,000.70 today (as of 01/20/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 59.97% (something to think about: how might OMC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Omnicom Group, Inc. paid investors a total of $26.10/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 3.2/share, we calculate that OMC has a current yield of approximately 4.10%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.2 against the original $68.65/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.97%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“As long as you enjoy investing, you’ll be willing to do the homework and stay in the game.” — Jim Cramer