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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 BorgWarner Inc (NYSE: BWA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2013.

Start date: 03/27/2013
$10,000

03/27/2013
  $14,009

03/24/2023
End date: 03/24/2023
Start price/share: $38.90
End price/share: $47.38
Starting shares: 257.07
Ending shares: 295.69
Dividends reinvested/share: $5.97
Total return: 40.10%
Average annual return: 3.43%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,009.58

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.43%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $14,009.58 today (as of 03/24/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 40.10% (something to think about: how might BWA shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that BorgWarner Inc paid investors a total of $5.97/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 .68/share, we calculate that BWA has a current yield of approximately 1.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .68 against the original $38.90/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.70%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control.” — Charlie Munger