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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— Warren Buffett

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

Start date: 06/08/2000
$10,000

06/08/2000
$183,340

06/05/2020
End date: 06/05/2020
Start price/share: $8.31
End price/share: $77.95
Starting shares: 1,203.37
Ending shares: 2,351.24
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.52
Total return: 1,732.79%
Average annual return: 15.65%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $183,340.64

As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $183,340.64 today (as of 06/05/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,732.79% (something to think about: how might PCAR shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PACCAR Inc. paid investors a total of $29.52/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 1.28/share, we calculate that PCAR has a current yield of approximately 1.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.28 against the original $8.31/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 19.74%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“While some might mistakenly consider value investing a mechanical tool for identifying bargains, it is actually a comprehensive investment philosophy that emphasizes the need to perform in-depth fundamental analysis, pursue long-term investment results, limit risk, and resist crowd psychology.” — Seth Klarman