“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
Such a great quote from Warren Buffett, highlighting the importance of investment time horizon when considering making an investment. In the short run, who knows what the stock market will do? A week or two after buying any given stock, could the entire stock market fall out of bed? Quite possibly! Should that happen, how would you react? It is an excellent question to think about before hitting the buy button.
For investors who take a multi-year time horizon, the important thing is not what happens in the next week or two, but what the result will be over the long haul. Today, we look at the result investors of the year 2004 experienced, who considered an investment in shares of General Dynamics Corp (NYSE: GD) and decided upon a two-decade investment time horizon.
| Start date: | 12/20/2004 |
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| End date: | 12/18/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $53.47 | ||||
| End price/share: | $262.27 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 187.02 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 289.27 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $57.00 | ||||
| Total return: | 658.66% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.66% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $75,888.31 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.66%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $75,888.31 today (as of 12/18/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 658.66% (something to think about: how might GD shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Beyond share price change, another component of GD’s total return these past 20 years has been the payment by General Dynamics Corp of $57.00/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 5.68/share, we calculate that GD has a current yield of approximately 2.17%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.68 against the original $53.47/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.06%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.” — Charlie Munger
