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

Start date: 04/01/2013
$10,000

04/01/2013
  $16,253

03/28/2023
End date: 03/28/2023
Start price/share: $35.28
End price/share: $42.76
Starting shares: 283.45
Ending shares: 380.15
Dividends reinvested/share: $17.50
Total return: 62.55%
Average annual return: 4.98%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $16,253.62

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.98%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $16,253.62 today (as of 03/28/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 62.55% (something to think about: how might CMA shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Comerica, Inc. paid investors a total of $17.50/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 2.84/share, we calculate that CMA has a current yield of approximately 6.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.84 against the original $35.28/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 18.82%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The most important three words in investing is: “I don’t know.” If someone doesn’t say that to you then they are lying.” — James Altucher