“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. (NYSE: MMC) back in 1999. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 08/16/1999 |
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| End date: | 08/14/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.97 | ||||
| End price/share: | $96.13 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 270.49 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 442.98 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $20.86 | ||||
| Total return: | 325.84% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.51% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $42,582.95 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $42,582.95 today (as of 08/14/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 325.84% (something to think about: how might MMC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. paid investors a total of $20.86/share in dividends over the 20 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 1.89%. 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 $36.97/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.11%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control.” — Charlie Munger
