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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 decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into PPG Industries Inc (NYSE: PPG)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 08/29/2014
$10,000

08/29/2014
  $14,649

08/28/2024
End date: 08/28/2024
Start price/share: $102.93
End price/share: $127.64
Starting shares: 97.15
Ending shares: 114.80
Dividends reinvested/share: $20.15
Total return: 46.53%
Average annual return: 3.89%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,649.68

The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.89%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $14,649.68 today (as of 08/28/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 46.53% (something to think about: how might PPG shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PPG Industries Inc paid investors a total of $20.15/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 2.72/share, we calculate that PPG has a current yield of approximately 2.13%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.72 against the original $102.93/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.07%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply…and they can’t predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack.” — Peter Lynch