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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a twenty year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2004, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Aon plc (NYSE: AON), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a twenty year holding period.

Start date: 07/12/2004
$10,000

07/12/2004
  $137,582

07/10/2024
End date: 07/10/2024
Start price/share: $27.68
End price/share: $295.41
Starting shares: 361.27
Ending shares: 465.61
Dividends reinvested/share: $23.92
Total return: 1,275.45%
Average annual return: 14.00%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $137,582.99

The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.00%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $137,582.99 today (as of 07/10/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,275.45% (something to think about: how might AON shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Aon plc paid investors a total of $23.92/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 2.7/share, we calculate that AON has a current yield of approximately 0.91%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.7 against the original $27.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.29%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.” — Peter Lynch