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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 Tiffany & Co. (NYSE: TIF)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 08/17/2009
$10,000

08/17/2009
$34,114

08/14/2019
End date: 08/14/2019
Start price/share: $29.45
End price/share: $82.73
Starting shares: 339.56
Ending shares: 412.41
Dividends reinvested/share: $15.04
Total return: 241.19%
Average annual return: 13.06%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $34,114.87

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.06%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $34,114.87 today (as of 08/14/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 241.19% (something to think about: how might TIF shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Tiffany & Co. paid investors a total of $15.04/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 2.32/share, we calculate that TIF has a current yield of approximately 2.80%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.32 against the original $29.45/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.51%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” — Robert Arnott