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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 Chubb Ltd (NYSE: CB)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 04/16/2009
$10,000

04/16/2009
$37,708

04/15/2019
End date: 04/15/2019
Start price/share: $46.41
End price/share: $138.96
Starting shares: 215.47
Ending shares: 271.46
Dividends reinvested/share: $22.24
Total return: 277.22%
Average annual return: 14.19%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $37,708.44

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.19%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $37,708.44 today (as of 04/15/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 277.22% (something to think about: how might CB shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Chubb Ltd paid investors a total of $22.24/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 2.92/share, we calculate that CB has a current yield of approximately 2.10%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.92 against the original $46.41/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.52%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.” — Peter Lynch