“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 Equity Residential (NYSE: EQR) 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: | 03/02/2010 |
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| End date: | 02/28/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.12 | ||||
| End price/share: | $75.10 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 276.85 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 440.78 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $30.36 | ||||
| Total return: | 231.02% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.72% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $33,113.86 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.72%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $33,113.86 today (as of 02/28/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 231.02% (something to think about: how might EQR shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Equity Residential paid investors a total of $30.36/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 2.27/share, we calculate that EQR has a current yield of approximately 3.02%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.27 against the original $36.12/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.36%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett
