“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a twenty year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2003, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Lowe’s Companies Inc (NYSE: LOW), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a twenty year holding period.
| Start date: | 12/15/2003 |
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| End date: | 12/13/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $27.09 | ||||
| End price/share: | $215.45 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 369.14 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 501.49 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $24.96 | ||||
| Total return: | 980.45% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.63% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $108,020.51 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.63%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $108,020.51 today (as of 12/13/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 980.45% (something to think about: how might LOW shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Lowe’s Companies Inc paid investors a total of $24.96/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 4.4/share, we calculate that LOW has a current yield of approximately 2.04%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.4 against the original $27.09/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.53%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Though tempting, trying to time the market is a loser’s game.” — Christopher Davis
