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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a decade-long holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into T-Mobile US Inc (NASD: TMUS) back in 2013: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 12/16/2013
$10,000

12/16/2013
  $59,684

12/14/2023
End date: 12/14/2023
Start price/share: $26.39
End price/share: $156.87
Starting shares: 378.93
Ending shares: 380.57
Dividends reinvested/share: $0.65
Total return: 497.00%
Average annual return: 19.56%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $59,684.16

As we can see, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.56%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $59,684.16 today (as of 12/14/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 497.00% (something to think about: how might TMUS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that T-Mobile US Inc paid investors a total of $0.65/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 2.60/share, we calculate that TMUS has a current yield of approximately 1.66%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.60 against the original $26.39/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.29%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.” — Jawaharlal Nehru