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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

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 Pioneer Natural Resources Co (NYSE: PXD)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2011.

Start date: 01/10/2011
$10,000

01/10/2011
$15,634

01/07/2021
End date: 01/07/2021
Start price/share: $87.86
End price/share: $131.99
Starting shares: 113.82
Ending shares: 118.44
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.28
Total return: 56.33%
Average annual return: 4.57%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $15,634.04

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $15,634.04 today (as of 01/07/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 56.33% (something to think about: how might PXD shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Pioneer Natural Resources Co paid investors a total of $4.28/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 2.2/share, we calculate that PXD has a current yield of approximately 1.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.2 against the original $87.86/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.90%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings.” — Peter Lynch