“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 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 Regions Financial Corp (NYSE: RF)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2000.
| Start date: | 09/11/2000 |
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| End date: | 09/08/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $19.84 | ||||
| End price/share: | $11.37 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 504.03 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 945.19 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $13.01 | ||||
| Total return: | 7.47% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 0.36% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $10,745.38 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $10,745.38 today (as of 09/08/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 7.47% (something to think about: how might RF shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Regions Financial Corp paid investors a total of $13.01/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 .62/share, we calculate that RF has a current yield of approximately 5.45%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .62 against the original $19.84/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 27.47%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Never is there a better time to buy a stock than when a basically sound company, for whatever reason, temporarily falls out of favor with the investment community.” — Geraldine Weiss
