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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 wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASD: ATVI) back in 2009. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 10/28/2009
$10,000

10/28/2009
$53,795

10/25/2019
End date: 10/25/2019
Start price/share: $11.39
End price/share: $55.26
Starting shares: 877.96
Ending shares: 973.25
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.39
Total return: 437.82%
Average annual return: 18.33%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $53,795.80

The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.33%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $53,795.80 today (as of 10/25/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 437.82% (something to think about: how might ATVI shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Activision Blizzard, Inc. paid investors a total of $2.39/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 .37/share, we calculate that ATVI has a current yield of approximately 0.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .37 against the original $11.39/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.88%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” — George Soros