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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 above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2012, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Texas Instruments Inc. (NASD: TXN), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 03/02/2012
$10,000

03/02/2012
$66,370

03/01/2022
End date: 03/01/2022
Start price/share: $32.82
End price/share: $167.29
Starting shares: 304.69
Ending shares: 396.77
Dividends reinvested/share: $22.94
Total return: 563.76%
Average annual return: 20.83%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $66,370.16

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 20.83%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $66,370.16 today (as of 03/01/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 563.76% (something to think about: how might TXN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Texas Instruments Inc. paid investors a total of $22.94/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 4.6/share, we calculate that TXN has a current yield of approximately 2.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.6 against the original $32.82/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.38%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don’t need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.” — Warren Buffett