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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— Warren Buffett

The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a twenty year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc (NYSE: PEG) back in 2002. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 10/03/2002
$10,000

10/03/2002
  $81,546

09/30/2022
End date: 09/30/2022
Start price/share: $15.20
End price/share: $56.23
Starting shares: 657.89
Ending shares: 1,449.86
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.81
Total return: 715.25%
Average annual return: 11.06%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $81,546.07

The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.06%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $81,546.07 today (as of 09/30/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 715.25% (something to think about: how might PEG shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Public Service Enterprise Group Inc paid investors a total of $29.81/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 2.16/share, we calculate that PEG has a current yield of approximately 3.84%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.16 against the original $15.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 25.26%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he is wrong.” — Bernard Baruch