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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 International Business Machines Corp (NYSE: IBM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2000.

Start date: 08/21/2000
$10,000

08/21/2000
$15,639

08/20/2020
End date: 08/20/2020
Start price/share: $121.44
End price/share: $123.15
Starting shares: 82.35
Ending shares: 127.09
Dividends reinvested/share: $60.60
Total return: 56.51%
Average annual return: 2.26%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $15,639.47

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.26%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $15,639.47 today (as of 08/20/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 56.51% (something to think about: how might IBM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that International Business Machines Corp paid investors a total of $60.60/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 6.52/share, we calculate that IBM has a current yield of approximately 5.29%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.52 against the original $121.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.36%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“While it might seem that anyone can be a value investor, the essential characteristics of this type of investor-patience, discipline, and risk aversion-may well be genetically determined.” — Seth Klarman