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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

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 ten year holding period for an investor who was considering DISH Network Corp (NASD: DISH) back in 2011, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 08/24/2011
$10,000

08/24/2011
$21,598

08/23/2021
End date: 08/23/2021
Start price/share: $22.24
End price/share: $43.19
Starting shares: 449.64
Ending shares: 500.09
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.00
Total return: 115.99%
Average annual return: 8.00%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $21,598.36

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.00%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $21,598.36 today (as of 08/23/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 115.99% (something to think about: how might DISH shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that DISH Network Corp paid investors a total of $3.00/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 /share, we calculate that DISH has a current yield of approximately 0.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of against the original $22.24/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.00%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.” — Benjamin Graham