“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. (NYSE: HIG)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.
| Start date: | 05/01/2003 |
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| End date: | 04/28/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $42.89 | ||||
| End price/share: | $70.99 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 233.15 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 359.08 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $20.74 | ||||
| Total return: | 154.91% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.79% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $25,498.12 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.79%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $25,498.12 today (as of 04/28/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 154.91% (something to think about: how might HIG shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. paid investors a total of $20.74/share in dividends over the 20 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 1.7/share, we calculate that HIG has a current yield of approximately 2.39%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.7 against the original $42.89/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.57%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.” — Benjamin Graham
