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

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 Berkley Corp (NYSE: WRB) 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: 04/15/2013
$10,000

04/15/2013
  $38,934

04/13/2023
End date: 04/13/2023
Start price/share: $19.69
End price/share: $62.66
Starting shares: 507.87
Ending shares: 621.22
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.53
Total return: 289.26%
Average annual return: 14.56%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $38,934.09

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.56%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $38,934.09 today (as of 04/13/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 289.26% (something to think about: how might WRB shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Berkley Corp paid investors a total of $7.53/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/share, we calculate that WRB has a current yield of approximately 0.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .4 against the original $19.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.25%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” — Seth Klarman