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I have individual stocks that have done well and don't pay dividends at all such as Berkshire Hathaway B shares
No dividends are really an enormous deal when it comes to compounding and you just cited perhaps the perfect example of a holding company that has proven it in spades. Buffett has talked at length about it. BRK never paid a dividend to shareholders but absolutely did do buybacks instead and largely because WB knew his talent as a capital manager would result in better return on equity for shareholders than a cash dividend, but his KO holdings did a lot of heavy dividend lifting for the past 40 years.
AI did some napkin math but if you put 10k into gold, 10k in KO stock set to DRIP and 10k in nice uncirculated 1909 SVDB Lincoln Cents in 1986, here's the outcome.
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Final Tally (all three $10k investments from 1986, with dividends/positions reinvested):
Gold $10,000 $120,413 12x
Coca-Cola (DRIP) $10,000 $330,000-$410,000 33-41x
1909-S VDB coins $10,000 $19,200-$24,500 1.9-2.5x
Coca-Cola crushes both by 10-20x. Gold beats coins 5-6x. Rare coins are a terrible pure capital appreciation play vs equities—they're hobbyist holdings with numismatic, not financial, payoff.
That's not cherry-picking timelines or examples.