“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2010, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Berkley Corp (NYSE: WRB), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 01/11/2010 |
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| End date: | 01/08/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $16.40 | ||||
| End price/share: | $68.17 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 609.76 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 746.76 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.93 | ||||
| Total return: | 409.07% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 17.68% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $50,913.49 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 17.68%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $50,913.49 today (as of 01/08/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 409.07% (something to think about: how might WRB shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Berkley Corp paid investors a total of $7.93/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 WRB has a current yield of approximately 0.65%. 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 $16.40/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.96%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” — Warren Buffett
