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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 Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into DuPont (NYSE: DD)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2013.

Start date: 01/22/2013
$10,000

01/22/2013
  $13,967

01/18/2023
End date: 01/18/2023
Start price/share: $68.23
End price/share: $73.18
Starting shares: 146.56
Ending shares: 190.78
Dividends reinvested/share: $25.45
Total return: 39.61%
Average annual return: 3.40%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $13,967.73

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $13,967.73 today (as of 01/18/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 39.61% (something to think about: how might DD shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that DuPont paid investors a total of $25.45/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 1.32/share, we calculate that DD has a current yield of approximately 1.80%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.32 against the original $68.23/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.64%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban