“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— 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 WEC Energy Group Inc (NYSE: WEC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.
| Start date: | 06/09/2003 |
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| End date: | 06/07/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $13.87 | ||||
| End price/share: | $89.48 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 720.98 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,297.21 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.98 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,060.74% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.04% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $116,166.39 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $116,166.39 today (as of 06/07/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,060.74% (something to think about: how might WEC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that WEC Energy Group Inc paid investors a total of $28.98/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 3.12/share, we calculate that WEC has a current yield of approximately 3.49%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.12 against the original $13.87/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 25.16%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“There is nothing riskier than the widespread perception that there is no risk.” — Howard Marks
