“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Hormel Foods Corp. (NYSE: HRL) back in 2010. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 01/25/2010 |
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| End date: | 01/22/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $9.65 | ||||
| End price/share: | $46.57 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 1,036.27 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,248.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.04 | ||||
| Total return: | 481.34% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 19.25% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $58,126.53 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $58,126.53 today (as of 01/22/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 481.34% (something to think about: how might HRL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hormel Foods Corp. paid investors a total of $5.04/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 .93/share, we calculate that HRL has a current yield of approximately 2.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .93 against the original $9.65/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 20.73%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.” — Warren Buffett
