Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

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

— Warren Buffett

Such a great quote from Warren Buffett, highlighting the importance of investment time horizon when considering making an investment. In the short run, who knows what the stock market will do? A week or two after buying any given stock, could the entire stock market fall out of bed? Quite possibly! Should that happen, how would you react? It is an excellent question to think about before hitting the buy button.

For investors who take a multi-year time horizon, the important thing is not what happens in the next week or two, but what the result will be over the long haul. Today, we look at the result investors of the year 2013 experienced, who considered an investment in shares of Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE) and decided upon a ten year investment time horizon.

Start date: 02/11/2013
$10,000

02/11/2013
  $24,111

02/09/2023
End date: 02/09/2023
Start price/share: $25.75
End price/share: $43.34
Starting shares: 388.35
Ending shares: 556.41
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.75
Total return: 141.15%
Average annual return: 9.20%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $24,111.62

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $24,111.62 today (as of 02/09/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 141.15% (something to think about: how might PFE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Many investors out there refuse to own any stock that lacks a dividend; in the case of Pfizer Inc, investors have received $12.75/share in dividends these past 10 years examined in the exercise above. This means total return was driven not just by share price, but also by the dividends received (and what the investor did with those dividends). For this exercise, what we’ve done with the dividends is to assume they are reinvestted — i.e. used to purchase additional shares (the calculations use closing price on ex-date).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.64/share, we calculate that PFE has a current yield of approximately 3.78%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.64 against the original $25.75/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 14.68%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.” — Benjamin Graham