“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 |
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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