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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Hess Corp (NYSE: HES)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2002.

Start date: 01/28/2002
$10,000

01/28/2002
$58,836

01/27/2022
End date: 01/27/2022
Start price/share: $19.87
End price/share: $89.68
Starting shares: 503.27
Ending shares: 656.54
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.10
Total return: 488.79%
Average annual return: 9.26%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $58,836.31

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.26%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $58,836.31 today (as of 01/27/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 488.79% (something to think about: how might HES shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Hess Corp paid investors a total of $13.10/share in dividends over the 20 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/share, we calculate that HES has a current yield of approximately 1.12%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $19.87/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.64%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana