Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 AmerisourceBergen Corp. (NYSE: ABC) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 02/02/2012
$10,000

02/02/2012
$41,018

02/01/2022
End date: 02/01/2022
Start price/share: $39.34
End price/share: $137.66
Starting shares: 254.19
Ending shares: 298.07
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.15
Total return: 310.32%
Average annual return: 15.15%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $41,018.06

As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.15%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,018.06 today (as of 02/01/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 310.32% (something to think about: how might ABC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that AmerisourceBergen Corp. paid investors a total of $13.15/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 1.84/share, we calculate that ABC has a current yield of approximately 1.34%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.84 against the original $39.34/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.41%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you’ll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you’ll find two.” — Peter Lynch