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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 investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a decade-long holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in MGM Resorts International (NYSE: MGM) back in 2009, holding through to today.

Start date: 07/01/2009
$10,000

07/01/2009
$47,597

06/28/2019
End date: 06/28/2019
Start price/share: $6.25
End price/share: $28.57
Starting shares: 1,600.00
Ending shares: 1,665.82
Dividends reinvested/share: $1.18
Total return: 375.93%
Average annual return: 16.89%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $47,597.91

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.89%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $47,597.91 today (as of 06/28/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 375.93% (something to think about: how might MGM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Beyond share price change, another component of MGM’s total return these past 10 years has been the payment by MGM Resorts International of $1.18/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .52/share, we calculate that MGM has a current yield of approximately 1.82%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .52 against the original $6.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 29.12%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts and in part on your ability to realize, at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike, that this too, shall pass.” — Jack Bogle