Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a ten year holding period for an investor who was considering Tiffany & Co. (NYSE: TIF) back in 2010, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 08/25/2010
$10,000

08/25/2010
$36,613

08/24/2020
End date: 08/24/2020
Start price/share: $42.21
End price/share: $127.03
Starting shares: 236.91
Ending shares: 288.26
Dividends reinvested/share: $16.57
Total return: 266.17%
Average annual return: 13.85%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $36,613.31

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.85%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $36,613.31 today (as of 08/24/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 266.17% (something to think about: how might TIF shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Tiffany & Co. paid investors a total of $16.57/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 2.32/share, we calculate that TIF has a current yield of approximately 1.83%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.32 against the original $42.21/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.34%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Don’t wait for the perfect time, you will wait forever. Always take advantage of the time you’re given and make it perfect.” — Daymond John