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

— 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 twenty year holding period for an investor who was considering Public Service Enterprise Group Inc (NYSE: PEG) back in 2004, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 06/14/2004
$10,000

06/14/2004
  $77,089

06/10/2024
End date: 06/10/2024
Start price/share: $20.29
End price/share: $73.44
Starting shares: 492.85
Ending shares: 1,049.94
Dividends reinvested/share: $31.93
Total return: 671.08%
Average annual return: 10.75%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $77,089.67

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.75%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $77,089.67 today (as of 06/10/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 671.08% (something to think about: how might PEG shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Public Service Enterprise Group Inc paid investors a total of $31.93/share in dividends over the 20 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 2.4/share, we calculate that PEG has a current yield of approximately 3.27%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.4 against the original $20.29/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 16.12%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“There is nothing riskier than the widespread perception that there is no risk.” — Howard Marks