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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 decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering Altria Group Inc (NYSE: MO) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 01/05/2012
$10,000

01/05/2012
$29,266

01/04/2022
End date: 01/04/2022
Start price/share: $28.83
End price/share: $49.03
Starting shares: 346.86
Ending shares: 596.75
Dividends reinvested/share: $25.80
Total return: 192.58%
Average annual return: 11.33%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $29,266.95

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.33%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $29,266.95 today (as of 01/04/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 192.58% (something to think about: how might MO shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Altria Group Inc paid investors a total of $25.80/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 3.6/share, we calculate that MO has a current yield of approximately 7.34%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.6 against the original $28.83/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 25.46%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” — Seth Klarman