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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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Starbucks Corp. (NASD: SBUX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 09/24/2009
$10,000

09/24/2009
$110,522

09/23/2019
End date: 09/23/2019
Start price/share: $9.59
End price/share: $90.81
Starting shares: 1,042.75
Ending shares: 1,216.97
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.80
Total return: 1,005.13%
Average annual return: 27.15%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $110,522.18

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 27.15%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $110,522.18 today (as of 09/23/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,005.13% (something to think about: how might SBUX shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Starbucks Corp. paid investors a total of $6.80/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 1.44/share, we calculate that SBUX has a current yield of approximately 1.59%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.44 against the original $9.59/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 16.58%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.” — John Maynard Keynes