“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 The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE: SCHW) 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: | 06/02/2003 |
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| End date: | 05/31/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $9.93 | ||||
| End price/share: | $52.69 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 1,007.05 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,325.59 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.88 | ||||
| Total return: | 598.45% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.20% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $69,819.80 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $69,819.80 today (as of 05/31/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 598.45% (something to think about: how might SCHW shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that The Charles Schwab Corporation paid investors a total of $7.88/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 SCHW has a current yield of approximately 1.90%. 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 $9.93/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 19.13%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“October is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.” — Mark Twain
