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“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 Franklin Resources Inc (NYSE: BEN)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 2004.

Start date: 11/12/2004
$10,000

11/12/2004
  $18,172

11/11/2024
End date: 11/11/2024
Start price/share: $21.50
End price/share: $21.57
Starting shares: 465.12
Ending shares: 842.54
Dividends reinvested/share: $18.61
Total return: 81.74%
Average annual return: 3.03%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $18,172.56

As shown above, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.03%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $18,172.56 today (as of 11/11/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 81.74% (something to think about: how might BEN shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Franklin Resources Inc paid investors a total of $18.61/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 1.24/share, we calculate that BEN has a current yield of approximately 5.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.24 against the original $21.50/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 26.74%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“I made my money by selling too soon.” — Bernard Baruch