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

Start date: 04/02/2012
$10,000

04/02/2012
$36,203

03/31/2022
End date: 03/31/2022
Start price/share: $30.04
End price/share: $81.65
Starting shares: 332.89
Ending shares: 443.55
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.43
Total return: 262.15%
Average annual return: 13.73%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $36,203.49

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.73%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $36,203.49 today (as of 03/31/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 262.15% (something to think about: how might SYY shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Sysco Corp paid investors a total of $14.43/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 1.88/share, we calculate that SYY has a current yield of approximately 2.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.88 against the original $30.04/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.66%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.” — Jim Rogers