“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a two-decade holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in Aon plc (NYSE: AON) back in 1999, holding through to today.
| Start date: | 09/16/1999 |
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| End date: | 09/13/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $32.69 | ||||
| End price/share: | $190.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 305.93 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 428.87 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $17.37 | ||||
| Total return: | 718.63% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.08% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $81,840.35 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.08%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $81,840.35 today (as of 09/13/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 718.63% (something to think about: how might AON shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 20 years, Aon plc has paid $17.37/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.76/share, we calculate that AON has a current yield of approximately 0.92%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.76 against the original $32.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.81%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts and in part on your ability to realize, at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike, that this too, shall pass.” — Jack Bogle
