“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering Microsoft Corporation (NASD: MSFT) back in 2014, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 01/21/2014 |
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| End date: | 01/17/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.17 | ||||
| End price/share: | $389.47 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 276.47 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 328.30 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $18.83 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,178.63% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 29.04% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $127,831.19 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 29.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $127,831.19 today (as of 01/17/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,178.63% (something to think about: how might MSFT shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Microsoft Corporation paid investors a total of $18.83/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/share, we calculate that MSFT has a current yield of approximately 0.77%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3 against the original $36.17/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.13%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control.” — Charlie Munger
