“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— 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 two-decade holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Apple Inc (NASD: AAPL) back in 2004: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full two-decade investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 20 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 09/23/2004 |
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| End date: | 09/20/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $0.67 | ||||
| End price/share: | $228.20 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 14,925.37 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 17,675.59 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.49 | ||||
| Total return: | 40,235.71% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 34.97% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $4,031,425.02 | ||||
As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 34.97%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $4,031,425.02 today (as of 09/20/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 40,235.71% (something to think about: how might AAPL shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Apple Inc paid investors a total of $8.49/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 1/share, we calculate that AAPL has a current yield of approximately 0.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $0.67/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 65.67%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“I make no attempt to forecast the market; my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.” — Warren Buffett
