“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a two-decade holding period for an investor who was considering Mastercard Inc (NYSE: MA) back in 2006, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 05/26/2006 |
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| End date: | 02/19/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $4.49 | ||||
| End price/share: | $520.26 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 2,227.17 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 2,453.83 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $19.81 | ||||
| Total return: | 12,666.29% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 27.83% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $1,276,646.38 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 27.83%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $1,276,646.38 today (as of 02/19/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 12,666.29% (something to think about: how might MA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Mastercard Inc paid investors a total of $19.81/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 3.48/share, we calculate that MA has a current yield of approximately 0.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.48 against the original $4.49/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 14.92%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Anyone who is not investing now is missing a tremendous opportunity.” — Carlos Slim
