“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a twenty year holding period for an investor who was considering Exxon Mobil Corp (NYSE: XOM) back in 2003, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 11/21/2003 |
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| End date: | 11/20/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $35.34 | ||||
| End price/share: | $104.50 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 282.97 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 545.16 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $48.77 | ||||
| Total return: | 469.69% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.08% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $56,926.73 | ||||
As we can see, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.08%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $56,926.73 today (as of 11/20/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 469.69% (something to think about: how might XOM shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Exxon Mobil Corp paid investors a total of $48.77/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 3.8/share, we calculate that XOM has a current yield of approximately 3.64%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.8 against the original $35.34/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.30%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The idea that a bell rings to signal when to get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.” — Jack Bogle
