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“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 3M Co (NYSE: MMM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.

Start date: 07/07/2003
$10,000

07/07/2003
  $25,749

07/06/2023
End date: 07/06/2023
Start price/share: $65.06
End price/share: $96.31
Starting shares: 153.70
Ending shares: 267.48
Dividends reinvested/share: $69.40
Total return: 157.61%
Average annual return: 4.84%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $25,749.29

As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.84%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $25,749.29 today (as of 07/06/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 157.61% (something to think about: how might MMM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that 3M Co paid investors a total of $69.40/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 6/share, we calculate that MMM has a current yield of approximately 6.23%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6 against the original $65.06/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.58%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.” — Warren Buffett