“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 decade-long holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Loews Corp. (NYSE: L) back in 2014: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full decade-long investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 10 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 06/16/2014 |
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| End date: | 06/13/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $43.23 | ||||
| End price/share: | $74.17 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 231.32 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 243.65 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $2.52 | ||||
| Total return: | 80.72% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.10% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,078.14 | ||||
The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.10%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $18,078.14 today (as of 06/13/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 80.72% (something to think about: how might L shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Loews Corp. paid investors a total of $2.52/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 .25/share, we calculate that L has a current yield of approximately 0.34%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .25 against the original $43.23/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.79%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that’s when the market is in the best possible hands.” — Victor Niederhoffer
