Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) shares have been well and truly out of form in recent weeks.
Since this time last month, the big four bank's shares have tumbled 14%.
This has been driven by a combination of profit taking, soft results from the big four banks, and a broad market selloff.
The latter has been caused by US President Donald Trump's trade tariffs, which has sparked concerns of a trade war that could ultimately cause a recession.
Impressively, despite recent weakness, CBA shares have still managed to deliver the goods for shareholders over the past 12 months. To demonstrate, let's see what a $10,000 investment in Australia's largest bank's shares a year ago would be worth now.
$10,000 invested in CBA shares
Back in March 2024, investors were able to buy the big four bank's shares for $116.22 a piece. This means that with a $10,000 investment, an investor could have picked up 86 shares in the bank.
While CBA shares are sadly no longer trading at their record high of $167.92, they ended last week comfortably higher than last year's buy price.
Last week, the bank's shares were fetching $142.36 at Friday's close. This means those 86 shares now have a market value of $12,242.96.
That's almost $2,250 greater than the original investment and represents a return of approximately 22.5%.
As a comparison, the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) is up just 1% over the same period. Both do not include dividends.
What about dividends?
Over the period, CBA has declared two dividend payments for its lucky shareholders.
The first was a fully franked final dividend of $2.50 per share that was paid in September. Whereas the second is a $2.25 per share interim dividend that will be paid in a couple of weeks.
I'm going to include the second dividend as part of the return in this article because CBA's shares have already gone ex-dividend for it and therefore its payment is a formality now.
This means total dividends of $4.75 per share, which pulls in dividend income of $408.50 for the 12 months.
As a result, investors that bought $10,000 worth of CBA shares a year ago, would have generated a total return of $2,651.46.
That's a total 12-month return of 26.5%, which is vastly superior to the average market return over the same period. It also significantly outperforms one of CBA's high interest savings accounts or term deposits.
