“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a ten year holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) back in 2012, holding through to today.
| Start date: | 02/07/2012 |
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| End date: | 02/04/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $52.13 | ||||
| End price/share: | $185.85 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 191.83 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 221.33 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $12.95 | ||||
| Total return: | 311.33% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.19% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $41,128.97 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.19%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,128.97 today (as of 02/04/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 311.33% (something to think about: how might AXP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, American Express Co. has paid $12.95/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.72/share, we calculate that AXP has a current yield of approximately 0.93%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $52.13/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.78%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.” — Ray Dalio
