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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 McCormick & Co Inc (NYSE: MKC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 07/20/2012
$10,000

07/20/2012
$32,196

07/19/2022
End date: 07/19/2022
Start price/share: $30.44
End price/share: $81.96
Starting shares: 328.52
Ending shares: 392.81
Dividends reinvested/share: $10.06
Total return: 221.95%
Average annual return: 12.40%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $32,196.02

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $32,196.02 today (as of 07/19/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 221.95% (something to think about: how might MKC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that McCormick & Co Inc paid investors a total of $10.06/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 MKC has a current yield of approximately 1.81%. 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 $30.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.95%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“A risk-reward ratio is important, but so is an aggravation-satisfaction ratio.” — Muriel Siebert