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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 Dish Network Corp (NASD: DISH)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 07/15/2009
$10,000

07/15/2009
$32,839

07/12/2019
End date: 07/12/2019
Start price/share: $15.61
End price/share: $41.87
Starting shares: 640.61
Ending shares: 784.07
Dividends reinvested/share: $5.00
Total return: 228.29%
Average annual return: 12.63%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $32,839.71

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.63%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $32,839.71 today (as of 07/12/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 228.29% (something to think about: how might DISH shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Dish Network Corp paid investors a total of $5.00/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 /share, we calculate that DISH has a current yield of approximately 0.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of against the original $15.61/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.00%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“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