Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

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

— 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 twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Robert Half International Inc. (NYSE: RHI) back in 1999. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 04/12/1999
$10,000

04/12/1999
$55,177

04/11/2019
End date: 04/11/2019
Start price/share: $15.53
End price/share: $66.49
Starting shares: 643.92
Ending shares: 829.27
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.21
Total return: 451.38%
Average annual return: 8.91%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $55,177.42

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.91%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $55,177.42 today (as of 04/11/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 451.38% (something to think about: how might RHI shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Robert Half International Inc. paid investors a total of $9.21/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 1.24/share, we calculate that RHI has a current yield of approximately 1.86%. 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 $15.53/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 11.98%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“A 10% decline in the market is fairly common, it happens about once a year. Investors who realize this are less likely to sell in a panic, and more likely to remain invested, benefitting from the wealthbuilding power of stocks.” — Christopher Davis