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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a decade-long holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into WEC Energy Group Inc (NYSE: WEC) back in 2010: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 11/26/2010
$10,000

11/26/2010
$43,980

11/24/2020
End date: 11/24/2020
Start price/share: $30.10
End price/share: $96.24
Starting shares: 332.23
Ending shares: 457.07
Dividends reinvested/share: $17.76
Total return: 339.88%
Average annual return: 15.96%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $43,980.31

As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.96%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $43,980.31 today (as of 11/24/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 339.88% (something to think about: how might WEC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that WEC Energy Group Inc paid investors a total of $17.76/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 2.53/share, we calculate that WEC has a current yield of approximately 2.63%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.53 against the original $30.10/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.74%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“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