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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

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a ten year holding period for an investor who was considering Royal Caribbean Group (NYSE: RCL) back in 2014, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 11/07/2014
$10,000

11/07/2014
  $38,154

11/06/2024
End date: 11/06/2024
Start price/share: $67.20
End price/share: $226.64
Starting shares: 148.81
Ending shares: 168.28
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.26
Total return: 281.39%
Average annual return: 14.32%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $38,154.05

As we can see, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.32%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $38,154.05 today (as of 11/06/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 281.39% (something to think about: how might RCL shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Royal Caribbean Group paid investors a total of $12.26/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 1.6/share, we calculate that RCL has a current yield of approximately 0.71%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $67.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.06%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“When everyone is going right, look left.” — Sam Zell