“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 Xcel Energy Inc (NASD: XEL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 01/14/2015 |
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| End date: | 01/13/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $36.47 | ||||
| End price/share: | $63.62 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 274.20 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 375.47 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $17.00 | ||||
| Total return: | 138.87% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.09% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $23,881.22 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.09%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $23,881.22 today (as of 01/13/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 138.87% (something to think about: how might XEL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Xcel Energy Inc paid investors a total of $17.00/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 2.19/share, we calculate that XEL has a current yield of approximately 3.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.19 against the original $36.47/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.43%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Although it’s easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket… it’s part-ownership of a business.” — Peter Lynch
