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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 Delta Air Lines Inc (NYSE: DAL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2013.

Start date: 10/23/2013
$10,000

10/23/2013
  $14,200

10/20/2023
End date: 10/20/2023
Start price/share: $25.61
End price/share: $32.23
Starting shares: 390.47
Ending shares: 440.43
Dividends reinvested/share: $5.92
Total return: 41.95%
Average annual return: 3.57%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,200.32

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $14,200.32 today (as of 10/20/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 41.95% (something to think about: how might DAL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Delta Air Lines Inc paid investors a total of $5.92/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 .4/share, we calculate that DAL has a current yield of approximately 1.24%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .4 against the original $25.61/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.84%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“I made my money by selling too soon.” — Bernard Baruch