“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Automatic Data Processing Inc. (NASD: ADP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2002.
| Start date: | 11/25/2002 |
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| End date: | 11/22/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $33.99 | ||||
| End price/share: | $261.97 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 294.20 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 463.84 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $35.59 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,115.13% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.30% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $121,589.30 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.30%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $121,589.30 today (as of 11/22/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,115.13% (something to think about: how might ADP shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Automatic Data Processing Inc. paid investors a total of $35.59/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 5/share, we calculate that ADP has a current yield of approximately 1.91%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $33.99/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.62%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply…and they can’t predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack.” — Peter Lynch
