“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a decade-long holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Alaska Air Group, Inc. (NYSE: ALK) back in 2009: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 03/26/2009 |
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| End date: | 03/25/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $4.67 | ||||
| End price/share: | $53.60 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 2,141.33 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 2,328.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.43 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,147.97% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 28.70% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $124,762.96 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 28.70%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $124,762.96 today (as of 03/25/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,147.97% (something to think about: how might ALK shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Alaska Air Group, Inc. paid investors a total of $5.43/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 1.4/share, we calculate that ALK has a current yield of approximately 2.61%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.4 against the original $4.67/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 55.89%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can’t trade.” — Bruce Kovner
