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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

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 AFLAC Inc (NYSE: AFL) 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: 08/24/2009
$10,000

08/24/2009
$30,699

08/22/2019
End date: 08/22/2019
Start price/share: $20.60
End price/share: $49.51
Starting shares: 485.44
Ending shares: 619.87
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.79
Total return: 206.90%
Average annual return: 11.87%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $30,699.86

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.87%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $30,699.86 today (as of 08/22/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 206.90% (something to think about: how might AFL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that AFLAC Inc paid investors a total of $7.79/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 1.08/share, we calculate that AFL has a current yield of approximately 2.18%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.08 against the original $20.60/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.58%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” — Benjamin Franklin