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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 decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering Keurig Dr Pepper Inc (NASD: KDP) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 07/30/2012
$10,000

07/30/2012
$60,842

07/28/2022
End date: 07/28/2022
Start price/share: $45.58
End price/share: $38.50
Starting shares: 219.39
Ending shares: 1,580.54
Dividends reinvested/share: $117.12
Total return: 508.51%
Average annual return: 19.79%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $60,842.30

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.79%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $60,842.30 today (as of 07/28/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 508.51% (something to think about: how might KDP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Keurig Dr Pepper Inc paid investors a total of $117.12/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 .75/share, we calculate that KDP has a current yield of approximately 1.95%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .75 against the original $45.58/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.28%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Know what you own and why you own it.” — Peter Lynch