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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 Extra Space Storage Inc (NYSE: EXR) 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: 02/16/2012
$10,000

02/16/2012
$99,867

02/15/2022
End date: 02/15/2022
Start price/share: $26.87
End price/share: $192.18
Starting shares: 372.16
Ending shares: 519.77
Dividends reinvested/share: $27.42
Total return: 898.90%
Average annual return: 25.86%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $99,867.60

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 25.86%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $99,867.60 today (as of 02/15/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 898.90% (something to think about: how might EXR shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Extra Space Storage Inc paid investors a total of $27.42/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 5/share, we calculate that EXR has a current yield of approximately 2.60%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $26.87/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.68%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” — Benjamin Graham