“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a decade-long period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2013, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Tyson Foods Inc (NYSE: TSN), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a decade-long holding period.
| Start date: | 03/15/2013 |
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| End date: | 03/14/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $24.41 | ||||
| End price/share: | $57.30 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 409.67 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 485.66 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.26 | ||||
| Total return: | 178.28% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.77% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $27,819.11 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.77%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $27,819.11 today (as of 03/14/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 178.28% (something to think about: how might TSN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Tyson Foods Inc paid investors a total of $11.26/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 1.92/share, we calculate that TSN has a current yield of approximately 3.35%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.92 against the original $24.41/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 13.72%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.” — Warren Buffett
