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“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: 04/29/2014
$10,000

04/29/2014
  $15,619

04/26/2024
End date: 04/26/2024
Start price/share: $78.64
End price/share: $112.73
Starting shares: 127.16
Ending shares: 138.58
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.41
Total return: 56.22%
Average annual return: 4.56%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $15,619.09

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.56%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $15,619.09 today (as of 04/26/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 56.22% (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 0.80%. 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 $78.64/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.02%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn’t.” — Seth Klarman