“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2003.
| Start date: | 12/08/2003 |
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| End date: | 12/07/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $32.67 | ||||
| End price/share: | $28.63 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 306.09 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 664.63 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $21.84 | ||||
| Total return: | 90.28% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.27% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $19,038.67 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.27%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $19,038.67 today (as of 12/07/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 90.28% (something to think about: how might PFE shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Pfizer Inc paid investors a total of $21.84/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 1.64/share, we calculate that PFE has a current yield of approximately 5.73%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.64 against the original $32.67/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.54%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” — Woody Allen
