“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 Northrop Grumman Corp (NYSE: NOC) 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: | 11/25/2014 |
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| End date: | 11/22/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $141.56 | ||||
| End price/share: | $496.87 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 70.64 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 82.78 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $51.41 | ||||
| Total return: | 311.29% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 15.19% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $41,128.97 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.19%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $41,128.97 today (as of 11/22/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 311.29% (something to think about: how might NOC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Northrop Grumman Corp paid investors a total of $51.41/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 8.24/share, we calculate that NOC has a current yield of approximately 1.66%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 8.24 against the original $141.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.17%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he is wrong.” — Bernard Baruch
NOC
