“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 CVS Health Corporation (NYSE: CVS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 11/07/2014 |
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| End date: | 11/06/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $88.38 | ||||
| End price/share: | $61.61 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 113.15 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 148.31 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $20.38 | ||||
| Total return: | -8.63% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.90% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,135.14 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.90%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $9,135.14 today (as of 11/06/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -8.63% (something to think about: how might CVS shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that CVS Health Corporation paid investors a total of $20.38/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 2.66/share, we calculate that CVS has a current yield of approximately 4.32%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.66 against the original $88.38/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.89%.
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
