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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

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 ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Anthem Inc (NYSE: ANTM) back in 2012. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 01/20/2012
$10,000

01/20/2012
$72,528

01/19/2022
End date: 01/19/2022
Start price/share: $71.78
End price/share: $448.29
Starting shares: 139.31
Ending shares: 161.84
Dividends reinvested/share: $26.28
Total return: 625.52%
Average annual return: 21.90%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $72,528.44

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.90%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $72,528.44 today (as of 01/19/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 625.52% (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 $26.28/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 1.01%. 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 $71.78/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.41%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions.” — Joel Greenblatt