“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— 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 ten year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Dominos Pizza Inc. (NYSE: DPZ) back in 2013: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full ten year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
Start date: | 03/25/2013 |
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End date: | 03/23/2023 | ||||
Start price/share: | $51.11 | ||||
End price/share: | $315.43 | ||||
Starting shares: | 195.66 | ||||
Ending shares: | 217.29 | ||||
Dividends reinvested/share: | $23.49 | ||||
Total return: | 585.41% | ||||
Average annual return: | 21.23% | ||||
Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
Ending investment: | $68,564.77 |
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.23%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $68,564.77 today (as of 03/23/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 585.41% (something to think about: how might DPZ shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Dominos Pizza Inc. paid investors a total of $23.49/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 4.84/share, we calculate that DPZ has a current yield of approximately 1.53%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.84 against the original $51.11/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.99%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The greater the passive income you can build, the freer you will become.” — Todd Fleming