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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— 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 Newell Brands Inc (NASD: NWL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 1999.

Start date: 12/13/1999
$10,000

12/13/1999
$10,554

12/10/2019
End date: 12/10/2019
Start price/share: $32.08
End price/share: $18.83
Starting shares: 311.74
Ending shares: 560.12
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.24
Total return: 5.47%
Average annual return: 0.27%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $10,554.23

The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.27%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $10,554.23 today (as of 12/10/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 5.47% (something to think about: how might NWL shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Newell Brands Inc paid investors a total of $14.24/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 .92/share, we calculate that NWL has a current yield of approximately 4.89%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .92 against the original $32.08/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 15.24%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.” — Benjamin Graham