“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Amgen Inc (NASD: AMGN) back in 2009. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 03/13/2009 |
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| End date: | 03/12/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $51.25 | ||||
| End price/share: | $184.18 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 195.12 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 232.78 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $24.81 | ||||
| Total return: | 328.74% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.67% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $42,892.42 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.67%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $42,892.42 today (as of 03/12/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 328.74% (something to think about: how might AMGN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Amgen Inc paid investors a total of $24.81/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 5.8/share, we calculate that AMGN has a current yield of approximately 3.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.8 against the original $51.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.15%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Waiting helps you as an investor and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.” — Charlie Munger
