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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 above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a ten year period?

Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2011, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about J.M. Smucker Co. (NYSE: SJM), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.

Start date: 12/19/2011
$10,000

12/19/2011
$23,543

12/16/2021
End date: 12/16/2021
Start price/share: $76.62
End price/share: $138.91
Starting shares: 130.51
Ending shares: 169.43
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.22
Total return: 135.35%
Average annual return: 8.94%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $23,543.65

The above analysis shows the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.94%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $23,543.65 today (as of 12/16/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 135.35% (something to think about: how might SJM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that J.M. Smucker Co. paid investors a total of $29.22/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 3.96/share, we calculate that SJM has a current yield of approximately 2.85%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.96 against the original $76.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.72%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Know what you own and why you own it.” — Peter Lynch