Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

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

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a two-decade holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Molson Coors Beverage Co (NYSE: TAP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2004.

Start date: 09/30/2004
$10,000

09/30/2004
  $26,088

09/27/2024
End date: 09/27/2024
Start price/share: $33.96
End price/share: $56.83
Starting shares: 294.46
Ending shares: 458.97
Dividends reinvested/share: $24.11
Total return: 160.83%
Average annual return: 4.91%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $26,088.66

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.91%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $26,088.66 today (as of 09/27/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 160.83% (something to think about: how might TAP shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Molson Coors Beverage Co paid investors a total of $24.11/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 1.76/share, we calculate that TAP has a current yield of approximately 3.10%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.76 against the original $33.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.13%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“As long as you enjoy investing, you’ll be willing to do the homework and stay in the game.” — Jim Cramer