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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

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Dominion Energy Inc (NYSE: D)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2013.

Start date: 09/19/2013
$10,000

09/19/2013
  $11,492

09/18/2023
End date: 09/18/2023
Start price/share: $63.21
End price/share: $48.63
Starting shares: 158.20
Ending shares: 236.33
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.05
Total return: 14.93%
Average annual return: 1.40%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,492.01

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 1.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $11,492.01 today (as of 09/18/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 14.93% (something to think about: how might D shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Dominion Energy Inc paid investors a total of $29.05/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 2.67/share, we calculate that D has a current yield of approximately 5.49%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.67 against the original $63.21/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.69%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion.” — Alfred Rappaport