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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a decade-long holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in Blackrock Inc (NYSE: BLK) back in 2012, holding through to today.

Start date: 12/05/2012
$10,000

12/05/2012
  $47,273

12/02/2022
End date: 12/02/2022
Start price/share: $192.44
End price/share: $712.98
Starting shares: 51.96
Ending shares: 66.30
Dividends reinvested/share: $113.22
Total return: 372.74%
Average annual return: 16.81%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $47,273.24

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.81%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $47,273.24 today (as of 12/02/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 372.74% (something to think about: how might BLK shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, Blackrock Inc has paid $113.22/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 19.52/share, we calculate that BLK has a current yield of approximately 2.74%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 19.52 against the original $192.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.42%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” — George Soros