“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2010, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Anthem Inc (NYSE: ANTM), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 08/16/2010 |
|
|||
| End date: | 08/13/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $51.62 | ||||
| End price/share: | $282.33 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 193.72 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 224.12 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $20.87 | ||||
| Total return: | 532.75% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 20.26% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $63,272.06 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 20.26%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $63,272.06 today (as of 08/13/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 532.75% (something to think about: how might ANTM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Anthem Inc paid investors a total of $20.87/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 3.8/share, we calculate that ANTM has a current yield of approximately 1.35%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.8 against the original $51.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.62%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.” — Warren Buffett
