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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 wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of NetApp, Inc. (NASD: NTAP) back in 2013. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 01/07/2013
$10,000

01/07/2013
  $23,414

01/05/2023
End date: 01/05/2023
Start price/share: $33.24
End price/share: $61.33
Starting shares: 300.84
Ending shares: 381.73
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.48
Total return: 134.11%
Average annual return: 8.88%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $23,414.30

The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.88%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $23,414.30 today (as of 01/05/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 134.11% (something to think about: how might NTAP shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that NetApp, Inc. paid investors a total of $12.48/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 2/share, we calculate that NTAP has a current yield of approximately 3.26%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $33.24/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.81%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“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