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“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 Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. (NASD: JKHY), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 04/16/2010
$10,000

04/16/2010
$74,639

04/15/2020
End date: 04/15/2020
Start price/share: $24.95
End price/share: $163.22
Starting shares: 400.80
Ending shares: 457.43
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.65
Total return: 646.62%
Average annual return: 22.25%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $74,639.16

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 22.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $74,639.16 today (as of 04/15/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 646.62% (something to think about: how might JKHY shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. paid investors a total of $9.65/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 1.72/share, we calculate that JKHY has a current yield of approximately 1.05%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $24.95/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.21%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.” — Peter Lynch