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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

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a ten year holding period for an investor who was considering Global Payments Inc (NYSE: GPN) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 03/08/2012
$10,000

03/08/2012
$48,543

03/07/2022
End date: 03/07/2022
Start price/share: $25.70
End price/share: $122.65
Starting shares: 389.11
Ending shares: 395.94
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.17
Total return: 385.62%
Average annual return: 17.11%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $48,543.13

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 17.11%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $48,543.13 today (as of 03/07/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 385.62% (something to think about: how might GPN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Global Payments Inc paid investors a total of $2.17/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/share, we calculate that GPN has a current yield of approximately 0.82%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $25.70/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.19%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.” — John Bogle