“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. (NYSE: MMC) back in 2009. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 08/03/2009 |
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| End date: | 07/31/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $20.90 | ||||
| End price/share: | $98.80 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 478.47 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 608.65 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.56 | ||||
| Total return: | 501.34% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 19.66% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $60,155.65 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.66%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $60,155.65 today (as of 07/31/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 501.34% (something to think about: how might MMC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. paid investors a total of $11.56/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 1.82/share, we calculate that MMC has a current yield of approximately 1.84%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.82 against the original $20.90/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.80%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“A 10% decline in the market is fairly common, it happens about once a year. Investors who realize this are less likely to sell in a panic, and more likely to remain invested, benefitting from the wealthbuilding power of stocks.” — Christopher Davis
