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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 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 Medtronic PLC (NYSE: MDT) back in 2010, holding through to today.

Start date: 04/30/2010
$10,000

04/30/2010
$28,130

04/29/2020
End date: 04/29/2020
Start price/share: $43.69
End price/share: $99.14
Starting shares: 228.89
Ending shares: 283.80
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.99
Total return: 181.35%
Average annual return: 10.89%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $28,130.01

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.89%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $28,130.01 today (as of 04/29/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 181.35% (something to think about: how might MDT shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, Medtronic PLC has paid $13.99/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 2.16/share, we calculate that MDT has a current yield of approximately 2.18%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.16 against the original $43.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.99%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The idea that a bell rings to signal when to get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.” — Jack Bogle