“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of American Tower Corp (NYSE: AMT) back in 2000. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 02/14/2000 |
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| End date: | 02/13/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $44.88 | ||||
| End price/share: | $256.90 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 222.84 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 258.16 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $17.28 | ||||
| Total return: | 563.20% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.92% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $66,371.95 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.92%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $66,371.95 today (as of 02/13/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 563.20% (something to think about: how might AMT shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Tower Corp paid investors a total of $17.28/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 4.04/share, we calculate that AMT has a current yield of approximately 1.57%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.04 against the original $44.88/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.50%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The idea that a bell rings to signal when to get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.” — Jack Bogle
