“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a two-decade holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Southwest Airlines Co (NYSE: LUV) back in 2002: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full two-decade investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 20 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 01/22/2002 |
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| End date: | 01/19/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $17.33 | ||||
| End price/share: | $44.43 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 577.03 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 630.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.21 | ||||
| Total return: | 180.05% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.28% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $27,992.39 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.28%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $27,992.39 today (as of 01/19/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 180.05% (something to think about: how might LUV shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 20 years, Southwest Airlines Co has paid $3.21/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .72/share, we calculate that LUV has a current yield of approximately 1.62%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .72 against the original $17.33/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.35%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can’t trade.” — Bruce Kovner
