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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 Kinder Morgan Inc. (NYSE: KMI)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 07/10/2014
$10,000

07/10/2014
  $9,368

07/09/2024
End date: 07/09/2024
Start price/share: $35.68
End price/share: $19.99
Starting shares: 280.27
Ending shares: 468.45
Dividends reinvested/share: $10.39
Total return: -6.36%
Average annual return: -0.65%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $9,368.35

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.65%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $9,368.35 today (as of 07/09/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -6.36% (something to think about: how might KMI shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Kinder Morgan Inc. paid investors a total of $10.39/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 1.15/share, we calculate that KMI has a current yield of approximately 5.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.15 against the original $35.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 16.12%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra