“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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2010.
| Start date: | 12/01/2010 |
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| End date: | 11/30/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $16.46 | ||||
| End price/share: | $9.08 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 607.53 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 896.59 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $4.68 | ||||
| Total return: | -18.59% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -2.03% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $8,144.83 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -2.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $8,144.83 today (as of 11/30/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -18.59% (something to think about: how might F shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ford Motor Co. paid investors a total of $4.68/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 .6/share, we calculate that F has a current yield of approximately 0.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .6 against the original $16.46/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.00%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful.” — Warren Buffett
