“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a decade-long holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 10 years to 2009, investors considering an investment into shares of Unum Group (NYSE: UNM) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full decade-long time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 12/14/2009 |
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| End date: | 12/11/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $19.42 | ||||
| End price/share: | $30.19 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 514.93 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 630.52 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.66 | ||||
| Total return: | 90.35% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $19,034.08 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $19,034.08 today (as of 12/11/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 90.35% (something to think about: how might UNM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Beyond share price change, another component of UNM’s total return these past 10 years has been the payment by Unum Group of $6.66/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.14/share, we calculate that UNM has a current yield of approximately 3.78%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.14 against the original $19.42/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 19.46%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn’t.” — Seth Klarman
