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 ten year 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 Texas Instruments Inc. (NASD: TXN), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 04/03/2013
$10,000

04/03/2013
  $71,114

03/31/2023
End date: 03/31/2023
Start price/share: $34.15
End price/share: $186.01
Starting shares: 292.83
Ending shares: 382.35
Dividends reinvested/share: $26.96
Total return: 611.20%
Average annual return: 21.68%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $71,114.56

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.68%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $71,114.56 today (as of 03/31/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 611.20% (something to think about: how might TXN shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Texas Instruments Inc. paid investors a total of $26.96/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 4.96/share, we calculate that TXN has a current yield of approximately 2.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.96 against the original $34.15/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.82%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The most important thing about an investment philosophy is that you have one.” — David Booth