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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 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 Loews Corp. (NYSE: L)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2013.

Start date: 04/24/2013
$10,000

04/24/2013
  $13,385

04/21/2023
End date: 04/21/2023
Start price/share: $44.51
End price/share: $56.44
Starting shares: 224.67
Ending shares: 237.18
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.52
Total return: 33.87%
Average annual return: 2.96%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $13,385.99

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.96%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $13,385.99 today (as of 04/21/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 33.87% (something to think about: how might L shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Loews Corp. paid investors a total of $2.52/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 .25/share, we calculate that L has a current yield of approximately 0.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .25 against the original $44.51/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.99%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.” — Bill Gross