“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 decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Berkley Corp (NYSE: WRB) 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: | 01/27/2012 |
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| End date: | 01/26/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $22.90 | ||||
| End price/share: | $82.36 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 436.68 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 542.19 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $10.02 | ||||
| Total return: | 346.55% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.13% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $44,647.81 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.13%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $44,647.81 today (as of 01/26/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 346.55% (something to think about: how might WRB shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Berkley Corp paid investors a total of $10.02/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 .52/share, we calculate that WRB has a current yield of approximately 0.63%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .52 against the original $22.90/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.75%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.” — Warren Buffett
