“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a ten year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Expedia Group Inc (NASD: EXPE) back in 2009: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 07/29/2009 |
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| End date: | 07/26/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.68 | ||||
| End price/share: | $139.42 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 272.63 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 464.83 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $23.30 | ||||
| Total return: | 548.07% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 20.55% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $64,781.32 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 20.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $64,781.32 today (as of 07/26/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 548.07% (something to think about: how might EXPE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Expedia Group Inc paid investors a total of $23.30/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 1.36/share, we calculate that EXPE has a current yield of approximately 0.98%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.36 against the original $36.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.67%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra
