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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 above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2011, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Duke Realty Corp (NYSE: DRE), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 03/08/2011
$10,000

03/08/2011
$41,884

03/05/2021
End date: 03/05/2021
Start price/share: $13.78
End price/share: $38.96
Starting shares: 725.69
Ending shares: 1,075.01
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.70
Total return: 318.83%
Average annual return: 15.40%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $41,884.96

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,884.96 today (as of 03/05/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 318.83% (something to think about: how might DRE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Duke Realty Corp paid investors a total of $8.70/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 1.02/share, we calculate that DRE has a current yield of approximately 2.62%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.02 against the original $13.78/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 19.01%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” — George Soros