“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a two-decade holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 20 years to 2003, investors considering an investment into shares of Merck & Co Inc (NYSE: MRK) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full two-decade time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 12/08/2003 |
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| End date: | 12/06/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $41.58 | ||||
| End price/share: | $105.63 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 240.50 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 490.17 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $35.53 | ||||
| Total return: | 417.77% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 8.57% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $51,819.15 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $51,819.15 today (as of 12/06/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 417.77% (something to think about: how might MRK shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Beyond share price change, another component of MRK’s total return these past 20 years has been the payment by Merck & Co Inc of $35.53/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 3.08/share, we calculate that MRK has a current yield of approximately 2.92%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.08 against the original $41.58/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.02%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“While it might seem that anyone can be a value investor, the essential characteristics of this type of investor-patience, discipline, and risk aversion-may well be genetically determined.” — Seth Klarman
