“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Apache Corp (NASD: APA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2010.
Start date: | 11/11/2010 |
|
|||
End date: | 11/10/2020 | ||||
Start price/share: | $110.71 | ||||
End price/share: | $9.99 | ||||
Starting shares: | 90.33 | ||||
Ending shares: | 106.63 | ||||
Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.31 | ||||
Total return: | -89.35% | ||||
Average annual return: | -20.05% | ||||
Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
Ending investment: | $1,065.74 |
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -20.05%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $1,065.74 today (as of 11/10/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -89.35% (something to think about: how might APA shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Apache Corp paid investors a total of $8.31/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 .1/share, we calculate that APA has a current yield of approximately 1.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .1 against the original $110.71/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.90%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Value investing means really asking what are the best values, and not assuming that because something looks expensive that it is, or assuming that because a stock is down in price and trades at low multiples that it is a bargain.” — Bill Miller