“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Regions Financial Corp (NYSE: RF)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2001.
| Start date: | 02/09/2001 |
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| End date: | 02/08/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $24.25 | ||||
| End price/share: | $19.54 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 412.37 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 764.12 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $12.73 | ||||
| Total return: | 49.31% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.02% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $14,921.12 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.02%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $14,921.12 today (as of 02/08/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 49.31% (something to think about: how might RF shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Regions Financial Corp paid investors a total of $12.73/share in dividends over the 20 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 .62/share, we calculate that RF has a current yield of approximately 3.17%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .62 against the original $24.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 13.07%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings.” — Peter Lynch
