“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc (NYSE: PEG) back in 2002. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 02/11/2002 |
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| End date: | 02/08/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $20.68 | ||||
| End price/share: | $67.25 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 483.56 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,083.19 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $29.00 | ||||
| Total return: | 628.45% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.44% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $72,906.17 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.44%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $72,906.17 today (as of 02/08/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 628.45% (something to think about: how might PEG shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Public Service Enterprise Group Inc paid investors a total of $29.00/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 2.04/share, we calculate that PEG has a current yield of approximately 3.03%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.04 against the original $20.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 14.65%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘this time it’s different.'” — Sir John Templeton
