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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 America Corp (NYSE: BAC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2012.

Start date: 04/23/2012
$10,000

04/23/2012
$55,154

04/21/2022
End date: 04/21/2022
Start price/share: $8.18
End price/share: $38.91
Starting shares: 1,222.49
Ending shares: 1,417.28
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.94
Total return: 451.46%
Average annual return: 18.62%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $55,154.28

As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.62%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $55,154.28 today (as of 04/21/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 451.46% (something to think about: how might BAC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, Bank of America Corp has paid $3.94/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .84/share, we calculate that BAC has a current yield of approximately 2.16%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .84 against the original $8.18/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 26.41%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.” — Benjamin Graham