“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year 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 Electronic Arts, Inc. (NASD: EA), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a twenty year holding period.
| Start date: | 02/27/2006 |
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| End date: | 02/24/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $53.02 | ||||
| End price/share: | $201.00 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 188.61 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 194.00 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.87 | ||||
| Total return: | 289.94% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.04% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $39,001.73 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $39,001.73 today (as of 02/24/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 289.94% (something to think about: how might EA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Electronic Arts, Inc. paid investors a total of $3.87/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 .76/share, we calculate that EA has a current yield of approximately 0.38%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .76 against the original $53.02/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.72%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach. If you are susceptible to selling everything in a panic, you ought to avoid stocks and mutual funds altogether.” — Peter Lynch
