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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

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 HP Inc (NYSE: HPQ)? Today, we examine the outcome of a ten year investment into the stock back in 2009.

Start date: 08/26/2009
$10,000

08/26/2009
$11,089

08/23/2019
End date: 08/23/2019
Start price/share: $20.20
End price/share: $17.81
Starting shares: 495.05
Ending shares: 622.42
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.49
Total return: 10.85%
Average annual return: 1.04%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,089.73

As shown above, the ten year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 1.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $11,089.73 today (as of 08/23/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 10.85% (something to think about: how might HPQ shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that HP Inc paid investors a total of $3.49/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 .6408/share, we calculate that HPQ has a current yield of approximately 3.60%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .6408 against the original $20.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.82%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“All the opportunity in the world means nothing if you don’t actually pull the trigger.” — Sam Zell