“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 Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE: PG) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 11/01/2012 |
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| End date: | 10/31/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $69.25 | ||||
| End price/share: | $134.67 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 144.40 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 193.86 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.87 | ||||
| Total return: | 161.07% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.07% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $26,109.82 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.07%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $26,109.82 today (as of 10/31/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 161.07% (something to think about: how might PG shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Procter & Gamble Company paid investors a total of $28.87/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 3.6532/share, we calculate that PG has a current yield of approximately 2.71%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.6532 against the original $69.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.91%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.” — William O’Neil
