July 2006 was just 20 years ago — Tiger Woods won the British Open and Taylor Swift’s debut album was still months away from being released. Were you investing then? If you invested $1,000 in Costco Wholesale (COST 0.50%) stock and kept it, then here’s how you would have done.
Your $1,000 stake in the company would have grown to $17,790. If you’d invested that $1,000 in the S&P 500 index instead, you’d have ended up with $6,030.
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But hold on — Costco is a dividend-paying stock, recently yielding 0.64%. That may not seem like much, but Costco also pays hefty “special” dividends every few years, most recently paying $15 per share in 2024.
What if you’d reinvested your dividends in more shares of Costco throughout your two decades of ownership? Well, then, your $1,000 would have grown to $26,130, while the total return of the S&P 500, including dividends,…
