“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 International Business Machines Corp (NYSE: IBM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2001.
| Start date: | 05/21/2001 |
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| End date: | 05/20/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $119.04 | ||||
| End price/share: | $143.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 84.01 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 134.25 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $65.10 | ||||
| Total return: | 93.16% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.34% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $19,298.59 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.34%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $19,298.59 today (as of 05/20/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 93.16% (something to think about: how might IBM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that International Business Machines Corp paid investors a total of $65.10/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 6.56/share, we calculate that IBM has a current yield of approximately 4.56%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.56 against the original $119.04/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.83%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Anyone who is not investing now is missing a tremendous opportunity.” — Carlos Slim
