“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into DXC Technology Co (NYSE: DXC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 1999.
| Start date: | 06/14/1999 |
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| End date: | 06/11/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $31.24 | ||||
| End price/share: | $50.73 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 320.10 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 493.15 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $13.63 | ||||
| Total return: | 150.18% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.69% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $25,015.72 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.69%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $25,015.72 today (as of 06/11/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 150.18% (something to think about: how might DXC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that DXC Technology Co paid investors a total of $13.63/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 .84/share, we calculate that DXC has a current yield of approximately 1.66%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .84 against the original $31.24/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.31%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“We ignore outlooks and forecasts… we’re lousy at it and we admit it … everyone else is lousy too, but most people won’t admit it.” — Martin Whitman
