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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— Warren Buffett

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a two-decade holding period for an investor who was considering Stanley Black & Decker Inc (NYSE: SWK) back in 1999, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 09/10/1999
$10,000

09/10/1999
$92,524

09/09/2019
End date: 09/09/2019
Start price/share: $25.56
End price/share: $143.14
Starting shares: 391.20
Ending shares: 646.25
Dividends reinvested/share: $31.47
Total return: 825.05%
Average annual return: 11.76%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $92,524.56

As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.76%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $92,524.56 today (as of 09/09/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 825.05% (something to think about: how might SWK shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Stanley Black & Decker Inc paid investors a total of $31.47/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 2.76/share, we calculate that SWK has a current yield of approximately 1.93%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.76 against the original $25.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.55%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“We ignore outlooks and forecasts… we’re lousy at it and we admit it … everyone else is lousy too, but most people won’t admit it.” — Martin Whitman