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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a twenty year holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in Interpublic Group of Companies Inc. (NYSE: IPG) back in 2003, holding through to today.

Start date: 12/15/2003
$10,000

12/15/2003
  $35,327

12/14/2023
End date: 12/14/2023
Start price/share: $13.89
End price/share: $32.74
Starting shares: 719.94
Ending shares: 1,079.20
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.24
Total return: 253.33%
Average annual return: 6.51%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $35,327.09

The above analysis shows the twenty year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $35,327.09 today (as of 12/14/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 253.33% (something to think about: how might IPG 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, Interpublic Group of Companies Inc. has paid $9.24/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 1.24/share, we calculate that IPG has a current yield of approximately 3.79%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.24 against the original $13.89/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 27.29%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Investors should purchase stocks like they purchase groceries, not like they purchase perfume.” — Benjamin Graham