“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 ten year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2013, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about WEC Energy Group Inc (NYSE: WEC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 12/16/2013 |
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| End date: | 12/14/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $41.02 | ||||
| End price/share: | $84.62 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 243.78 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 333.15 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $22.82 | ||||
| Total return: | 181.91% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.92% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $28,190.23 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.92%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $28,190.23 today (as of 12/14/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 181.91% (something to think about: how might WEC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that WEC Energy Group Inc paid investors a total of $22.82/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 3.12/share, we calculate that WEC has a current yield of approximately 3.69%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.12 against the original $41.02/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.00%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” — Robert Arnott
