“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a decade-long holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Lilly (Eli) & Co (NYSE: LLY) back in 2010: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 03/18/2010 |
|
|||
| End date: | 03/17/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.36 | ||||
| End price/share: | $143.20 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 275.03 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 386.65 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $21.00 | ||||
| Total return: | 453.68% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.65% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $55,345.76 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $55,345.76 today (as of 03/17/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 453.68% (something to think about: how might LLY shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Lilly (Eli) & Co paid investors a total of $21.00/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 2.96/share, we calculate that LLY has a current yield of approximately 2.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.96 against the original $36.36/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.69%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“It’s not always easy to do what’s not popular, but that’s where you make your money. Buy stocks that look bad to less careful investors and hang on until their real value is recognized.” — John Neff
