“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 Bath & Body Works Inc (NYSE: BBWI) 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: | 03/03/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $15.08 | ||||
| End price/share: | $52.14 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 663.13 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,808.46 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $30.59 | ||||
| Total return: | 842.93% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.87% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $94,364.06 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.87%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $94,364.06 today (as of 03/03/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 842.93% (something to think about: how might BBWI shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Bath & Body Works Inc paid investors a total of $30.59/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 .8/share, we calculate that BBWI has a current yield of approximately 1.53%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .8 against the original $15.08/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.15%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.” — Peter Lynch
