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“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 Fidelity National Information Services Inc (NYSE: FIS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2010.

Start date: 11/11/2010
$10,000

11/11/2010
$60,496

11/10/2020
End date: 11/10/2020
Start price/share: $27.59
End price/share: $144.36
Starting shares: 362.45
Ending shares: 419.08
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.86
Total return: 504.98%
Average annual return: 19.71%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $60,496.80

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.71%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $60,496.80 today (as of 11/10/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 504.98% (something to think about: how might FIS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Fidelity National Information Services Inc paid investors a total of $9.86/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 1.4/share, we calculate that FIS has a current yield of approximately 0.97%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.4 against the original $27.59/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.52%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.” — Seth Klarman