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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into American International Group Inc (NYSE: AIG)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 1999.

Start date: 12/20/1999
$10,000

12/20/1999
$549

12/19/2019
End date: 12/19/2019
Start price/share: $1,366.40
End price/share: $51.93
Starting shares: 7.32
Ending shares: 10.58
Dividends reinvested/share: $84.94
Total return: -94.50%
Average annual return: -13.50%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $549.08

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -13.50%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $549.08 today (as of 12/19/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -94.50% (something to think about: how might AIG shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that American International Group Inc paid investors a total of $84.94/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 1.28/share, we calculate that AIG has a current yield of approximately 2.46%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.28 against the original $1366.40/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.18%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Don’t look for the needle in the haystack, just buy the haystack.” — John Bogle