“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Occidental Petroleum Corp (NYSE: OXY)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2011.
| Start date: | 12/08/2011 |
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| End date: | 12/07/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $88.78 | ||||
| End price/share: | $31.12 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 112.64 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 166.55 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $23.45 | ||||
| Total return: | -48.17% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -6.36% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $5,181.53 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -6.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $5,181.53 today (as of 12/07/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -48.17% (something to think about: how might OXY shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Occidental Petroleum Corp paid investors a total of $23.45/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 .04/share, we calculate that OXY has a current yield of approximately 0.13%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .04 against the original $88.78/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.15%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“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
