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“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

— 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 two-decade 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 C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASD: CHRW) back in 2004, holding through to today.

Start date: 07/26/2004
$10,000

07/26/2004
  $62,823

07/24/2024
End date: 07/24/2024
Start price/share: $21.81
End price/share: $90.21
Starting shares: 458.51
Ending shares: 696.55
Dividends reinvested/share: $29.99
Total return: 528.36%
Average annual return: 9.62%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $62,823.74

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.62%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $62,823.74 today (as of 07/24/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 528.36% (something to think about: how might CHRW shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Beyond share price change, another component of CHRW’s total return these past 20 years has been the payment by C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. of $29.99/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 2.44/share, we calculate that CHRW has a current yield of approximately 2.70%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.44 against the original $21.81/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 12.38%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.” — Benjamin Graham