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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Exelon Corp (NASD: EXC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2000.

Start date: 04/06/2000
$10,000

04/06/2000
$34,268

04/03/2020
End date: 04/03/2020
Start price/share: $19.81
End price/share: $32.75
Starting shares: 504.80
Ending shares: 1,046.35
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.37
Total return: 242.68%
Average annual return: 6.35%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $34,268.60

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.35%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $34,268.60 today (as of 04/03/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 242.68% (something to think about: how might EXC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Exelon Corp paid investors a total of $29.37/share in dividends over the 20 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 1.53/share, we calculate that EXC has a current yield of approximately 4.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.53 against the original $19.81/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 23.57%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The greater the passive income you can build, the freer you will become.” — Todd Fleming