“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 United Technologies Corp (NYSE: UTX) back in 1999, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 11/11/1999 |
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| End date: | 11/08/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $26.91 | ||||
| End price/share: | $148.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 371.61 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 556.15 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $31.76 | ||||
| Total return: | 728.00% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.14% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $82,729.27 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.14%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $82,729.27 today (as of 11/08/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 728.00% (something to think about: how might UTX shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that United Technologies Corp paid investors a total of $31.76/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 2.94/share, we calculate that UTX has a current yield of approximately 1.97%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.94 against the original $26.91/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.32%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Never is there a better time to buy a stock than when a basically sound company, for whatever reason, temporarily falls out of favor with the investment community.” — Geraldine Weiss
