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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Tractor Supply Co. (NASD: TSCO)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 1999.

Start date: 04/22/1999
$10,000

04/22/1999
$633,693

04/18/2019
End date: 04/18/2019
Start price/share: $1.79
End price/share: $103.09
Starting shares: 5,586.59
Ending shares: 6,149.45
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.05
Total return: 6,239.47%
Average annual return: 23.05%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $633,693.36

As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 23.05%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $633,693.36 today (as of 04/18/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 6,239.47% (something to think about: how might TSCO shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 20 years, Tractor Supply Co. has paid $6.05/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.24/share, we calculate that TSCO has a current yield of approximately 1.20%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.24 against the original $1.79/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 67.04%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.” — Seth Klarman