“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into General Dynamics Corp (NYSE: GD) back in 1999: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full twenty year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 20 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 04/30/1999 |
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| End date: | 04/29/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $35.13 | ||||
| End price/share: | $179.21 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 284.66 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 419.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $33.28 | ||||
| Total return: | 652.43% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.61% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $75,225.97 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.61%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $75,225.97 today (as of 04/29/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 652.43% (something to think about: how might GD shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that General Dynamics Corp paid investors a total of $33.28/share in dividends over the 20 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 4.08/share, we calculate that GD has a current yield of approximately 2.28%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.08 against the original $35.13/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.49%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” — Benjamin Graham
