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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

This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a decade-long holding period potentially?

For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 10 years to 2010, investors considering an investment into shares of Stanley Black & Decker Inc (NYSE: SWK) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full decade-long time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.

Start date: 09/21/2010
$10,000

09/21/2010
$32,850

09/18/2020
End date: 09/18/2020
Start price/share: $60.44
End price/share: $160.33
Starting shares: 165.45
Ending shares: 204.85
Dividends reinvested/share: $21.98
Total return: 228.43%
Average annual return: 12.63%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $32,850.41

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.63%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $32,850.41 today (as of 09/18/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 228.43% (something to think about: how might SWK shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Stanley Black & Decker Inc paid investors a total of $21.98/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 2.8/share, we calculate that SWK has a current yield of approximately 1.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.8 against the original $60.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.90%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.” — Seth Klarman