“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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold (NYSE: FCX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2013.
| Start date: | 04/04/2013 |
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| End date: | 04/03/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $31.70 | ||||
| End price/share: | $41.20 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 315.46 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 384.82 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.45 | ||||
| Total return: | 58.54% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.72% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $15,861.75 | ||||
As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.72%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $15,861.75 today (as of 04/03/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 58.54% (something to think about: how might FCX shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold paid investors a total of $5.45/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 .3/share, we calculate that FCX has a current yield of approximately 0.73%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .3 against the original $31.70/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.30%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.” — Peter Lynch
