Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 03/07/2014
$10,000

03/07/2014
  $14,593

03/06/2024
End date: 03/06/2024
Start price/share: $82.21
End price/share: $110.06
Starting shares: 121.64
Ending shares: 132.56
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.41
Total return: 45.90%
Average annual return: 3.85%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,593.35

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.85%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $14,593.35 today (as of 03/06/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 45.90% (something to think about: how might DIS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Walt Disney Co. paid investors a total of $9.41/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 .90/share, we calculate that DIS has a current yield of approximately 0.82%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .90 against the original $82.21/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.00%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” — Warren Buffett