“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 two-decade holding period for an investor who was considering Valero Energy Corp (NYSE: VLO) back in 2004, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 04/12/2004 |
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| End date: | 04/11/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $13.78 | ||||
| End price/share: | $177.04 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 725.69 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 1,245.50 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $35.61 | ||||
| Total return: | 2,105.04% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.72% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $220,618.24 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.72%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $220,618.24 today (as of 04/11/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 2,105.04% (something to think about: how might VLO shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Valero Energy Corp paid investors a total of $35.61/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 4.28/share, we calculate that VLO has a current yield of approximately 2.42%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.28 against the original $13.78/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.56%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions.” — Joel Greenblatt
