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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 JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2012.

Start date: 03/30/2012
$10,000

03/30/2012
$40,400

03/29/2022
End date: 03/29/2022
Start price/share: $45.98
End price/share: $141.18
Starting shares: 217.49
Ending shares: 286.13
Dividends reinvested/share: $23.46
Total return: 303.96%
Average annual return: 14.98%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $40,400.72

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.98%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $40,400.72 today (as of 03/29/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 303.96% (something to think about: how might JPM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that JPMorgan Chase & Co paid investors a total of $23.46/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 4/share, we calculate that JPM has a current yield of approximately 2.83%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4 against the original $45.98/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.15%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” — George Soros