Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 APA Corp (NASD: APA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.

Start date: 06/16/2003
$10,000

06/16/2003
  $13,847

06/15/2023
End date: 06/15/2023
Start price/share: $32.10
End price/share: $34.67
Starting shares: 311.53
Ending shares: 399.52
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.17
Total return: 38.51%
Average annual return: 1.64%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $13,847.47

The above analysis shows the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 1.64%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $13,847.47 today (as of 06/15/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 38.51% (something to think about: how might APA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that APA Corp paid investors a total of $13.17/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/share, we calculate that APA has a current yield of approximately 2.88%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $32.10/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.97%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — John Maynard Keynes