“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a twenty year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc (NYSE: TMO) back in 2002: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full twenty year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 20 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 03/04/2002 |
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| End date: | 03/02/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $20.11 | ||||
| End price/share: | $556.45 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 497.27 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 519.21 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.90 | ||||
| Total return: | 2,789.16% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.31% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $289,087.47 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.31%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $289,087.47 today (as of 03/02/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 2,789.16% (something to think about: how might TMO shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc paid investors a total of $6.90/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 1.2/share, we calculate that TMO has a current yield of approximately 0.22%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.2 against the original $20.11/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.09%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.” — Seth Klarman
