“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering American Tower Corp (NYSE: AMT) back in 2016, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 02/29/2016 |
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| End date: | 02/26/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $92.20 | ||||
| End price/share: | $185.01 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 108.46 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 138.56 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $47.05 | ||||
| Total return: | 156.36% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.87% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $25,632.52 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.87%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $25,632.52 today (as of 02/26/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 156.36% (something to think about: how might AMT shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Tower Corp paid investors a total of $47.05/share in dividends over the 10 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 6.8/share, we calculate that AMT has a current yield of approximately 3.68%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.8 against the original $92.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.99%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett
