“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a ten year holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in Goldman Sachs Group Inc (the (NYSE: GS) back in 2010, holding through to today.
| Start date: | 04/05/2010 |
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| End date: | 04/01/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $173.16 | ||||
| End price/share: | $145.29 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 57.75 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 66.58 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $25.12 | ||||
| Total return: | -3.26% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.33% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,674.95 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.33%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $9,674.95 today (as of 04/01/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -3.26% (something to think about: how might GS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Goldman Sachs Group Inc (the paid investors a total of $25.12/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/share, we calculate that GS has a current yield of approximately 3.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $173.16/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.99%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘this time it’s different.'” — Sir John Templeton
