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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— 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 Analog Devices Inc (NASD: ADI)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2004.

Start date: 04/23/2004
$10,000

04/23/2004
  $61,702

04/22/2024
End date: 04/22/2024
Start price/share: $47.62
End price/share: $186.31
Starting shares: 210.00
Ending shares: 331.18
Dividends reinvested/share: $31.11
Total return: 517.01%
Average annual return: 9.52%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $61,702.32

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.52%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $61,702.32 today (as of 04/22/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 517.01% (something to think about: how might ADI shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Analog Devices Inc paid investors a total of $31.11/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 3.68/share, we calculate that ADI has a current yield of approximately 1.98%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.68 against the original $47.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.16%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” — Pablo Picasso