“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2010, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Air Products & Chemicals Inc (NYSE: APD), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 03/23/2010 |
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| End date: | 03/20/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $69.88 | ||||
| End price/share: | $189.15 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 143.10 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 183.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $30.30 | ||||
| Total return: | 247.77% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.27% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $34,765.54 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.27%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $34,765.54 today (as of 03/20/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 247.77% (something to think about: how might APD shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Air Products & Chemicals Inc paid investors a total of $30.30/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 5.36/share, we calculate that APD has a current yield of approximately 2.83%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.36 against the original $69.88/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.05%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.” — Warren Buffett
