“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 Sysco Corp (NYSE: SYY)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2003.
| Start date: | 08/22/2003 |
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| End date: | 08/21/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $30.55 | ||||
| End price/share: | $71.07 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 327.33 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 566.74 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $23.71 | ||||
| Total return: | 302.78% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.21% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $40,275.16 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.21%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $40,275.16 today (as of 08/21/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 302.78% (something to think about: how might SYY shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Many investors out there refuse to own any stock that lacks a dividend; in the case of Sysco Corp, investors have received $23.71/share in dividends these past 20 years examined in the exercise above. This means total return was driven not just by share price, but also by the dividends received (and what the investor did with those dividends). For this exercise, what we’ve done with the dividends is to assume they are reinvestted — i.e. used to purchase additional shares (the calculations use closing price on ex-date).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 2/share, we calculate that SYY has a current yield of approximately 2.81%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $30.55/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.20%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.” — Ray Dalio
