“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 Intercontinental Exchange Inc (NYSE: ICE) back in 2014, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 11/13/2014 |
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| End date: | 11/12/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $44.64 | ||||
| End price/share: | $156.06 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 224.01 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 254.76 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.32 | ||||
| Total return: | 297.57% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 14.79% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $39,752.90 | ||||
As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.79%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $39,752.90 today (as of 11/12/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 297.57% (something to think about: how might ICE shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Intercontinental Exchange Inc paid investors a total of $11.32/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 1.8/share, we calculate that ICE has a current yield of approximately 1.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.8 against the original $44.64/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.58%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“I make no attempt to forecast the market; my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.” — Warren Buffett
