“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Ecolab Inc (NYSE: ECL) back in 2013. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 10/10/2013 |
|
|||
| End date: | 10/09/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $98.83 | ||||
| End price/share: | $167.68 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 101.18 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 113.14 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $16.74 | ||||
| Total return: | 89.72% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.61% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,969.49 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.61%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $18,969.49 today (as of 10/09/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 89.72% (something to think about: how might ECL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ecolab Inc paid investors a total of $16.74/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 2.12/share, we calculate that ECL has a current yield of approximately 1.26%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.12 against the original $98.83/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.27%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“He who earns and does not invest will have to work for the rest of his life.” — Debasish Mridha
