Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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
$10,000

03/15/2013
  $27,819

03/14/2023
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