“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 Hartford Insurance Group Inc (NYSE: HIG)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 08/03/2015 |
|
|||
| End date: | 07/31/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $48.23 | ||||
| End price/share: | $124.39 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 207.34 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 257.36 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $13.55 | ||||
| Total return: | 220.13% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.34% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $32,014.31 | ||||
As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.34%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $32,014.31 today (as of 07/31/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 220.13% (something to think about: how might HIG shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hartford Insurance Group Inc paid investors a total of $13.55/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 2.08/share, we calculate that HIG has a current yield of approximately 1.67%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.08 against the original $48.23/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.46%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” — Charlie Munger
