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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 ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Royal Caribbean Group (NYSE: RCL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2012.

Start date: 03/26/2012
$10,000

03/26/2012
$29,913

03/24/2022
End date: 03/24/2022
Start price/share: $30.30
End price/share: $76.87
Starting shares: 330.03
Ending shares: 389.21
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.74
Total return: 199.18%
Average annual return: 11.58%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $29,913.25

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.58%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $29,913.25 today (as of 03/24/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 199.18% (something to think about: how might RCL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Royal Caribbean Group paid investors a total of $13.74/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 3.12/share, we calculate that RCL has a current yield of approximately 4.06%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.12 against the original $30.30/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 13.40%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett