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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— 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 two-decade period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2003, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about NetApp, Inc. (NASD: NTAP), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a two-decade holding period.

Start date: 05/19/2003
$10,000

05/19/2003
  $55,878

05/17/2023
End date: 05/17/2023
Start price/share: $14.96
End price/share: $65.41
Starting shares: 668.45
Ending shares: 854.92
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.98
Total return: 459.20%
Average annual return: 8.98%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $55,878.28

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.98%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $55,878.28 today (as of 05/17/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 459.20% (something to think about: how might NTAP shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that NetApp, Inc. paid investors a total of $12.98/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 2/share, we calculate that NTAP has a current yield of approximately 3.06%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $14.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 20.45%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Ensure management’s interests are aligned with shareholders.” — Sam Zell