“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Bank of New York Mellon Corp (NYSE: BK) back in 2021: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 02/03/2021 |
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| End date: | 02/02/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $41.06 | ||||
| End price/share: | $121.61 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 243.55 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 280.30 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.30 | ||||
| Total return: | 240.87% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 27.80% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $34,092.14 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 27.80%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $34,092.14 today (as of 02/02/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 240.87% (something to think about: how might BK shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Bank of New York Mellon Corp paid investors a total of $8.30/share in dividends over the 5 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 2.12/share, we calculate that BK has a current yield of approximately 1.74%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.12 against the original $41.06/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.24%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” — George Soros
