“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2009, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Nucor Corp. (NYSE: NUE), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 03/26/2009 |
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| End date: | 03/25/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $41.09 | ||||
| End price/share: | $56.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 243.37 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 333.61 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $14.77 | ||||
| Total return: | 89.76% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.61% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,969.49 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.61%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $18,969.49 today (as of 03/25/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 89.76% (something to think about: how might NUE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Nucor Corp. paid investors a total of $14.77/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 1.6/share, we calculate that NUE has a current yield of approximately 2.81%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $41.09/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.84%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep.” — Robert Kiyosaki
