“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of TJX Companies (NYSE: TJX) back in 2001. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 04/27/2001 |
|
|||
| End date: | 04/26/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $3.96 | ||||
| End price/share: | $69.28 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 2,525.25 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 3,165.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.32 | ||||
| Total return: | 2,093.31% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.69% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $219,486.30 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.69%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $219,486.30 today (as of 04/26/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 2,093.31% (something to think about: how might TJX shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that TJX Companies paid investors a total of $5.32/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 1.04/share, we calculate that TJX has a current yield of approximately 1.50%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.04 against the original $3.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 37.88%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“In the long run, we are all dead.” — John Maynard Keynes
