“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering MetLife Inc (NYSE: MET) back in 2010, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 01/27/2010 |
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| End date: | 01/24/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $32.44 | ||||
| End price/share: | $51.27 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 308.26 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 407.41 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.65 | ||||
| Total return: | 108.88% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $20,895.49 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $20,895.49 today (as of 01/24/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 108.88% (something to think about: how might MET shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that MetLife Inc paid investors a total of $11.65/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 1.76/share, we calculate that MET has a current yield of approximately 3.43%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.76 against the original $32.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.57%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“We ignore outlooks and forecasts… we’re lousy at it and we admit it … everyone else is lousy too, but most people won’t admit it.” — Martin Whitman
