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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 ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Noble Energy Inc (NYSE: NBL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 04/24/2009
$10,000

04/24/2009
$10,335

04/23/2019
End date: 04/23/2019
Start price/share: $30.35
End price/share: $27.86
Starting shares: 329.49
Ending shares: 371.01
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.77
Total return: 3.36%
Average annual return: 0.33%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $10,335.04

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.33%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $10,335.04 today (as of 04/23/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 3.36% (something to think about: how might NBL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Noble Energy Inc paid investors a total of $4.77/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 .48/share, we calculate that NBL has a current yield of approximately 1.72%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .48 against the original $30.35/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.67%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don’t need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.” — Warren Buffett