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“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 two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into UDR Inc (NYSE: UDR)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.

Start date: 01/31/2003
$10,000

01/31/2003
  $65,174

01/30/2023
End date: 01/30/2023
Start price/share: $15.99
End price/share: $41.36
Starting shares: 625.39
Ending shares: 1,574.69
Dividends reinvested/share: $24.21
Total return: 551.29%
Average annual return: 9.82%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $65,174.04

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.82%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $65,174.04 today (as of 01/30/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 551.29% (something to think about: how might UDR shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that UDR Inc paid investors a total of $24.21/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 1.52/share, we calculate that UDR has a current yield of approximately 3.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.52 against the original $15.99/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 22.95%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“You can’t restate a dividend.” — Malon Wilkus