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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 Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year 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 ten year investment into the stock back in 2010.

Start date: 05/21/2010
$10,000

05/21/2010
$14,163

05/20/2020
End date: 05/20/2020
Start price/share: $39.43
End price/share: $36.97
Starting shares: 253.61
Ending shares: 383.09
Dividends reinvested/share: $15.36
Total return: 41.63%
Average annual return: 3.54%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,163.30

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.54%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $14,163.30 today (as of 05/20/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 41.63% (something to think about: how might EXC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Exelon Corp paid investors a total of $15.36/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 1.53/share, we calculate that EXC has a current yield of approximately 4.14%. 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 $39.43/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.50%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time.” — Shelby Davis