“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into APA Corp (NASD: APA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2002.
| Start date: | 07/08/2002 |
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| End date: | 07/06/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $27.05 | ||||
| End price/share: | $32.01 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 369.69 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 467.07 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $12.49 | ||||
| Total return: | 49.51% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.03% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $14,949.60 | ||||
The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $14,949.60 today (as of 07/06/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 49.51% (something to think about: how might APA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that APA Corp paid investors a total of $12.49/share in dividends over the 20 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 .5/share, we calculate that APA has a current yield of approximately 1.56%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .5 against the original $27.05/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.77%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.” — Warren Buffett
