“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 TJX Companies (NYSE: TJX) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
Start date: | 10/18/2012 |
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End date: | 10/17/2022 | ||||
Start price/share: | $21.62 | ||||
End price/share: | $65.89 | ||||
Starting shares: | 462.53 | ||||
Ending shares: | 527.18 | ||||
Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.91 | ||||
Total return: | 247.36% | ||||
Average annual return: | 13.26% | ||||
Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
Ending investment: | $34,746.71 |
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.26%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $34,746.71 today (as of 10/17/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 247.36% (something to think about: how might TJX shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that TJX Companies paid investors a total of $5.91/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 1.18/share, we calculate that TJX has a current yield of approximately 1.79%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.18 against the original $21.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.28%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“While some might mistakenly consider value investing a mechanical tool for identifying bargains, it is actually a comprehensive investment philosophy that emphasizes the need to perform in-depth fundamental analysis, pursue long-term investment results, limit risk, and resist crowd psychology.” — Seth Klarman