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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a ten year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into PulteGroup Inc (NYSE: PHM) back in 2009: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 11/23/2009
$10,000

11/23/2009
$44,803

11/21/2019
End date: 11/21/2019
Start price/share: $9.56
End price/share: $38.98
Starting shares: 1,046.03
Ending shares: 1,149.34
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.14
Total return: 348.01%
Average annual return: 16.18%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $44,803.68

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.18%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $44,803.68 today (as of 11/21/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 348.01% (something to think about: how might PHM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PulteGroup Inc paid investors a total of $2.14/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 .44/share, we calculate that PHM has a current yield of approximately 1.13%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .44 against the original $9.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 11.82%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you’ll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you’ll find two.” — Peter Lynch