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

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 decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of DTE Energy Co (NYSE: DTE) back in 2012. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 03/01/2012
$10,000

03/01/2012
$37,183

02/28/2022
End date: 02/28/2022
Start price/share: $46.31
End price/share: $121.59
Starting shares: 215.94
Ending shares: 305.76
Dividends reinvested/share: $27.82
Total return: 271.78%
Average annual return: 14.03%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $37,183.26

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $37,183.26 today (as of 02/28/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 271.78% (something to think about: how might DTE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that DTE Energy Co paid investors a total of $27.82/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 3.54/share, we calculate that DTE has a current yield of approximately 2.91%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.54 against the original $46.31/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.28%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.” — Bill Gross