“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 2013, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Dollar General Corp (NYSE: DG), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a ten year holding period.
| Start date: | 10/07/2013 |
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| End date: | 10/04/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $57.14 | ||||
| End price/share: | $107.03 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 175.01 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 190.73 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.27 | ||||
| Total return: | 104.14% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.40% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $20,415.40 | ||||
As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.40%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $20,415.40 today (as of 10/04/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 104.14% (something to think about: how might DG shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Dollar General Corp paid investors a total of $11.27/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 2.36/share, we calculate that DG has a current yield of approximately 2.21%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.36 against the original $57.14/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.87%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“All intelligent investing is value investing: acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.” — Charlie Munger
