“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 Comerica, Inc. (NYSE: CMA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a two-decade investment into the stock back in 1999.
| Start date: | 08/27/1999 |
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| End date: | 08/26/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $54.56 | ||||
| End price/share: | $59.82 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 183.28 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 323.95 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.37 | ||||
| Total return: | 93.79% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.36% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $19,373.46 | ||||
As we can see, the two-decade investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $19,373.46 today (as of 08/26/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 93.79% (something to think about: how might CMA shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Comerica, Inc. paid investors a total of $28.37/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 2.68/share, we calculate that CMA has a current yield of approximately 4.48%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.68 against the original $54.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.21%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” — John Galbraith
