“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of 3M Co (NYSE: MMM) back in 2016. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 02/23/2016 |
|
|||
| End date: | 02/20/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $130.58 | ||||
| End price/share: | $167.06 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 76.58 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 106.33 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $43.01 | ||||
| Total return: | 77.63% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.91% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $17,757.00 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.91%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $17,757.00 today (as of 02/20/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 77.63% (something to think about: how might MMM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, 3M Co has paid $43.01/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 3.12/share, we calculate that MMM has a current yield of approximately 1.87%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.12 against the original $130.58/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.43%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“A 10% decline in the market is fairly common, it happens about once a year. Investors who realize this are less likely to sell in a panic, and more likely to remain invested, benefitting from the wealthbuilding power of stocks.” — Christopher Davis
