“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a ten year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold (NYSE: FCX) back in 2014. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 05/29/2014 |
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| End date: | 05/28/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $34.27 | ||||
| End price/share: | $53.63 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 291.80 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 330.69 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.32 | ||||
| Total return: | 77.35% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.89% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $17,729.06 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.89%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $17,729.06 today (as of 05/28/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 77.35% (something to think about: how might FCX shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold paid investors a total of $3.32/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 FCX has a current yield of approximately 0.56%. 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 $34.27/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.63%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“If I’ve learned one thing in this life it’s this: even if you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” — Daymond John
