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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a ten year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Dominos Pizza Inc. (NYSE: DPZ) back in 2013: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 03/25/2013
$10,000

03/25/2013
  $68,564

03/23/2023
End date: 03/23/2023
Start price/share: $51.11
End price/share: $315.43
Starting shares: 195.66
Ending shares: 217.29
Dividends reinvested/share: $23.49
Total return: 585.41%
Average annual return: 21.23%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $68,564.77

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.23%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $68,564.77 today (as of 03/23/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 585.41% (something to think about: how might DPZ shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Dominos Pizza Inc. paid investors a total of $23.49/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 4.84/share, we calculate that DPZ has a current yield of approximately 1.53%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.84 against the original $51.11/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.99%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The greater the passive income you can build, the freer you will become.” — Todd Fleming