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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Kellogg (NYSE: K)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 03/02/2009
$10,000

03/02/2009
$19,949

02/28/2019
End date: 02/28/2019
Start price/share: $37.96
End price/share: $56.26
Starting shares: 263.44
Ending shares: 354.57
Dividends reinvested/share: $18.10
Total return: 99.48%
Average annual return: 7.15%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $19,949.03

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.15%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $19,949.03 today (as of 02/28/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 99.48% (something to think about: how might K shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Kellogg Co paid investors a total of $18.10/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 2.24/share, we calculate that K has a current yield of approximately 3.98%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.24 against the original $37.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.48%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.” — Peter Lynch