“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into State Street Corp. (NYSE: STT)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 1999.
| Start date: | 08/02/1999 |
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| End date: | 07/31/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $34.84 | ||||
| End price/share: | $58.09 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 287.03 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 380.45 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $16.72 | ||||
| Total return: | 121.00% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.04% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $22,087.59 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $22,087.59 today (as of 07/31/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 121.00% (something to think about: how might STT shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that State Street Corp. paid investors a total of $16.72/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 1.88/share, we calculate that STT has a current yield of approximately 3.24%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.88 against the original $34.84/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.30%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep.” — Robert Kiyosaki
