“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 two-decade holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Prudential Financial Inc (NYSE: PRU) back in 2003. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 02/27/2003 |
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| End date: | 02/24/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $30.36 | ||||
| End price/share: | $99.04 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 329.38 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 592.37 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $44.27 | ||||
| Total return: | 486.69% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.25% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $58,700.18 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $58,700.18 today (as of 02/24/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 486.69% (something to think about: how might PRU shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Prudential Financial Inc paid investors a total of $44.27/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 5/share, we calculate that PRU has a current yield of approximately 5.05%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $30.36/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 16.63%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” — Robert Arnott
