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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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Prudential Financial Inc (NYSE: PRU)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2010.

Start date: 07/07/2010
$10,000

07/07/2010
$15,385

07/06/2020
End date: 07/06/2020
Start price/share: $55.76
End price/share: $61.31
Starting shares: 179.34
Ending shares: 250.99
Dividends reinvested/share: $26.14
Total return: 53.88%
Average annual return: 4.40%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $15,385.35

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $15,385.35 today (as of 07/06/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 53.88% (something to think about: how might PRU 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, Prudential Financial Inc has paid $26.14/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 4.4/share, we calculate that PRU has a current yield of approximately 7.18%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.4 against the original $55.76/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 12.88%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” — Seth Klarman