“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Anthem Inc (NYSE: ANTM) back in 2011. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 10/21/2011 |
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| End date: | 10/20/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $66.65 | ||||
| End price/share: | $424.05 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 150.04 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 174.44 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $25.40 | ||||
| Total return: | 639.72% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 22.14% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $73,969.91 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 22.14%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $73,969.91 today (as of 10/20/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 639.72% (something to think about: how might ANTM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Anthem Inc paid investors a total of $25.40/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 4.52/share, we calculate that ANTM has a current yield of approximately 1.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.52 against the original $66.65/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.61%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you’re looking for a home run, a great investment for five years or 10 years or more, then the only way to beat this enormous fog that covers the future is to identify a long-term trend that will give a particular business some sort of edge.” — Ralph Wanger
