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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— 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 two-decade holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Best Buy Inc (NYSE: BBY) 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: 06/01/1999
$10,000

06/01/1999
$43,382

05/30/2019
End date: 05/30/2019
Start price/share: $20.83
End price/share: $65.01
Starting shares: 480.08
Ending shares: 667.13
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.43
Total return: 333.70%
Average annual return: 7.61%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $43,382.49

The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.61%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $43,382.49 today (as of 05/30/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 333.70% (something to think about: how might BBY shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Best Buy Inc paid investors a total of $12.43/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 2/share, we calculate that BBY has a current yield of approximately 3.08%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $20.83/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 14.79%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.” — Albert Einstein