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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a ten year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Nike (NYSE: NKE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 09/02/2014
$10,000

09/02/2014
  $23,408

08/29/2024
End date: 08/29/2024
Start price/share: $39.64
End price/share: $83.26
Starting shares: 252.27
Ending shares: 281.03
Dividends reinvested/share: $9.37
Total return: 133.98%
Average annual return: 8.88%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $23,408.84

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.88%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $23,408.84 today (as of 08/29/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 133.98% (something to think about: how might NKE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Nike paid investors a total of $9.37/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 1.48/share, we calculate that NKE has a current yield of approximately 1.78%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.48 against the original $39.64/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.49%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” — Phillip Fisher