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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

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a ten year holding period for an investor who was considering Estee Lauder Cos., Inc. (NYSE: EL) back in 2013, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 03/18/2013
$10,000

03/18/2013
  $42,285

03/16/2023
End date: 03/16/2023
Start price/share: $62.44
End price/share: $237.23
Starting shares: 160.15
Ending shares: 178.21
Dividends reinvested/share: $15.20
Total return: 322.76%
Average annual return: 15.51%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $42,285.93

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $42,285.93 today (as of 03/16/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 322.76% (something to think about: how might EL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Estee Lauder Cos., Inc. paid investors a total of $15.20/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 2.64/share, we calculate that EL has a current yield of approximately 1.11%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.64 against the original $62.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.78%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” — Benjamin Graham