“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a decade-long period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2009, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Intercontinental Exchange Inc (NYSE: ICE), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 06/04/2009 |
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| End date: | 06/03/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $23.95 | ||||
| End price/share: | $82.52 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 417.54 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 447.57 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.95 | ||||
| Total return: | 269.33% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.95% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $36,923.14 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.95%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $36,923.14 today (as of 06/03/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 269.33% (something to think about: how might ICE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Intercontinental Exchange Inc paid investors a total of $3.95/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 1.1/share, we calculate that ICE has a current yield of approximately 1.33%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.1 against the original $23.95/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.55%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.” — Seth Klarman
