“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASD: CHRW), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a two-decade holding period.
| Start date: | 01/27/2006 |
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| End date: | 01/26/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $40.44 | ||||
| End price/share: | $178.11 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 247.28 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 379.99 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $32.68 | ||||
| Total return: | 576.80% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.03% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $67,713.80 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $67,713.80 today (as of 01/26/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 576.80% (something to think about: how might CHRW shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. paid investors a total of $32.68/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 2.52/share, we calculate that CHRW has a current yield of approximately 1.41%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.52 against the original $40.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.49%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.” — Benjamin Graham
