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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 Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Bank of New York Mellon Corp (NYSE: BK)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2012.

Start date: 03/22/2012
$10,000

03/22/2012
$27,148

03/21/2022
End date: 03/21/2022
Start price/share: $23.70
End price/share: $52.18
Starting shares: 421.94
Ending shares: 520.36
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.86
Total return: 171.52%
Average annual return: 10.50%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $27,148.23

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.50%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $27,148.23 today (as of 03/21/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 171.52% (something to think about: how might BK shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Bank of New York Mellon Corp paid investors a total of $8.86/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 1.36/share, we calculate that BK has a current yield of approximately 2.61%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.36 against the original $23.70/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 11.01%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” — George Soros