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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

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a decade-long holding period for an investor who was considering Qualcomm Inc (NASD: QCOM) back in 2012, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 10/01/2012
$10,000

10/01/2012
  $24,579

09/29/2022
End date: 09/29/2022
Start price/share: $61.91
End price/share: $114.84
Starting shares: 161.52
Ending shares: 214.10
Dividends reinvested/share: $21.68
Total return: 145.88%
Average annual return: 9.41%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $24,579.34

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.41%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $24,579.34 today (as of 09/29/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 145.88% (something to think about: how might QCOM shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Qualcomm Inc paid investors a total of $21.68/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/share, we calculate that QCOM has a current yield of approximately 2.61%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3 against the original $61.91/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.22%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The person who starts simply with the idea of getting rich won’t succeed; you must have a larger ambition.” — John Rockefeller