“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a twenty year holding period for an investor who was considering Walmart Inc (NYSE: WMT) back in 2001, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 03/26/2001 |
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| End date: | 03/24/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $49.60 | ||||
| End price/share: | $133.11 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 201.61 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 294.70 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $26.56 | ||||
| Total return: | 292.28% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.07% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $39,221.00 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.07%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $39,221.00 today (as of 03/24/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 292.28% (something to think about: how might WMT shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Walmart Inc paid investors a total of $26.56/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 2.2/share, we calculate that WMT has a current yield of approximately 1.65%. 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 $49.60/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.33%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — John Maynard Keynes
