“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 twenty year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. (NYSE: MMC) back in 2003: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full twenty year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 20 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 05/12/2003 |
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| End date: | 05/11/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $48.38 | ||||
| End price/share: | $180.37 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 206.70 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 331.41 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $24.73 | ||||
| Total return: | 497.76% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.35% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $59,813.77 | ||||
The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.35%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $59,813.77 today (as of 05/11/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 497.76% (something to think about: how might MMC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. paid investors a total of $24.73/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 2.36/share, we calculate that MMC has a current yield of approximately 1.31%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.36 against the original $48.38/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.71%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“You can’t be a good value investor without being an independent thinker; you’re seeing valuations that the market is not appreciating. But it’s critical that you understand why the market isn’t seeing the value you do.” — Joel Greenblatt
