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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a ten year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Mastercard Inc (NYSE: MA) back in 2011: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 12/09/2011
$10,000

12/09/2011
$95,891

12/08/2021
End date: 12/08/2021
Start price/share: $37.74
End price/share: $342.34
Starting shares: 264.97
Ending shares: 280.10
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.72
Total return: 858.89%
Average annual return: 25.35%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $95,891.71

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 25.35%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $95,891.71 today (as of 12/08/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 858.89% (something to think about: how might MA shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Mastercard Inc paid investors a total of $8.72/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 1.96/share, we calculate that MA has a current yield of approximately 0.57%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.96 against the original $37.74/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.51%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.” — Benjamin Graham