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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 above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2012, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Campbell Soup Co (NYSE: CPB), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 06/01/2012
$10,000

06/01/2012
$20,576

05/31/2022
End date: 05/31/2022
Start price/share: $31.33
End price/share: $47.91
Starting shares: 319.18
Ending shares: 429.41
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.36
Total return: 105.73%
Average annual return: 7.48%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $20,576.07

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.48%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $20,576.07 today (as of 05/31/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 105.73% (something to think about: how might CPB shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Campbell Soup Co paid investors a total of $13.36/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 1.48/share, we calculate that CPB has a current yield of approximately 3.09%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.48 against the original $31.33/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.86%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than lost in the corrections themselves.” — Peter Lynch