“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2002, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Iron Mountain Inc (NYSE: IRM), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a twenty year holding period.
| Start date: | 08/15/2002 |
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| End date: | 08/12/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $11.81 | ||||
| End price/share: | $54.03 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 846.74 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,867.93 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $26.46 | ||||
| Total return: | 909.24% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.25% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $100,925.75 | ||||
The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $100,925.75 today (as of 08/12/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 909.24% (something to think about: how might IRM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Iron Mountain Inc paid investors a total of $26.46/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 2.474/share, we calculate that IRM has a current yield of approximately 4.58%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.474 against the original $11.81/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 38.78%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don’t need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.” — Warren Buffett
