Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2009, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Skyworks Solutions Inc (NASD: SWKS), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 10/15/2009
$10,000

10/15/2009
$76,449

10/14/2019
End date: 10/14/2019
Start price/share: $11.99
End price/share: $84.98
Starting shares: 834.03
Ending shares: 899.91
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.01
Total return: 664.74%
Average annual return: 22.55%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $76,449.58

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 22.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $76,449.58 today (as of 10/14/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 664.74% (something to think about: how might SWKS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Skyworks Solutions Inc paid investors a total of $6.01/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 1.76/share, we calculate that SWKS has a current yield of approximately 2.07%. 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 $11.99/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.26%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“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