“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 General Electric Co (NYSE: GE) 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: | 11/03/2014 |
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| End date: | 10/31/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $123.16 | ||||
| End price/share: | $171.78 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 81.20 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 95.22 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $17.66 | ||||
| Total return: | 63.58% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.05% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,364.47 | ||||
The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.05%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $16,364.47 today (as of 10/31/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 63.58% (something to think about: how might GE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Beyond share price change, another component of GE’s total return these past 10 years has been the payment by General Electric Co of $17.66/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.12/share, we calculate that GE has a current yield of approximately 0.65%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.12 against the original $123.16/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.53%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts and in part on your ability to realize, at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike, that this too, shall pass.” — Jack Bogle
