“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
Such a great quote from Warren Buffett, highlighting the importance of investment time horizon when considering making an investment. In the short run, who knows what the stock market will do? A week or two after buying any given stock, could the entire stock market fall out of bed? Quite possibly! Should that happen, how would you react? It is an excellent question to think about before hitting the buy button.
For investors who take a multi-year time horizon, the important thing is not what happens in the next week or two, but what the result will be over the long haul. Today, we look at the result investors of the year 1999 experienced, who considered an investment in shares of Ecolab Inc (NYSE: ECL) and decided upon a twenty year investment time horizon.
| Start date: | 07/23/1999 |
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| End date: | 07/22/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $21.09 | ||||
| End price/share: | $197.24 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 474.16 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 602.52 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $15.09 | ||||
| Total return: | 1,088.42% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.17% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $118,909.12 | ||||
As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.17%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $118,909.12 today (as of 07/22/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,088.42% (something to think about: how might ECL shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Beyond share price change, another component of ECL’s total return these past 20 years has been the payment by Ecolab Inc of $15.09/share in dividends to shareholders. Automatic reinvestment of dividends can be a wonderful way to compound returns, and for the above calculations we presume that dividends are reinvested into additional shares of stock. (For the purpose of these calcuations, the closing price on ex-date is used).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.84/share, we calculate that ECL has a current yield of approximately 0.93%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.84 against the original $21.09/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.41%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“If you’re looking for a home run, a great investment for five years or 10 years or more, then the only way to beat this enormous fog that covers the future is to identify a long-term trend that will give a particular business some sort of edge.” — Ralph Wanger
