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 Everest Re Group Ltd (NYSE: RE), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 11/25/2009
$10,000

11/25/2009
$38,012

11/22/2019
End date: 11/22/2019
Start price/share: $86.73
End price/share: $267.23
Starting shares: 115.30
Ending shares: 142.24
Dividends reinvested/share: $33.48
Total return: 280.11%
Average annual return: 14.29%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $38,012.23

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.29%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $38,012.23 today (as of 11/22/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 280.11% (something to think about: how might RE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Everest Re Group Ltd paid investors a total of $33.48/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 6.2/share, we calculate that RE has a current yield of approximately 2.32%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.2 against the original $86.73/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.67%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“History provides a crucial insight regarding market crises: they are inevitable, painful and ultimately surmountable.” — Shelby Davis