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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— 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 ten year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into PPG Industries Inc (NYSE: PPG) back in 2013: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 06/24/2013
$10,000

06/24/2013
  $22,751

06/21/2023
End date: 06/21/2023
Start price/share: $73.34
End price/share: $142.34
Starting shares: 136.35
Ending shares: 159.88
Dividends reinvested/share: $18.46
Total return: 127.57%
Average annual return: 8.57%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $22,751.00

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $22,751.00 today (as of 06/21/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 127.57% (something to think about: how might PPG shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PPG Industries Inc paid investors a total of $18.46/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 2.48/share, we calculate that PPG has a current yield of approximately 1.74%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.48 against the original $73.34/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.37%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“When everyone is going right, look left.” — Sam Zell