What If I Invested $1000 20-Years Ago?
On this post I’ll pretend that exactly 20 years ago I invested $1000 into each of 17 stocks that are currently in my portfolio. I did not sell and reinvested all the dividends. Data will be calculated from Longrundata.com’s Dividend Reinvestment Calculator.
The start date is October 25, 1993 and the end date is October 25, 2013. I was a little over 10 years old at that time in 1993. If a stock did not exist as a publicly traded company in 1993, it will be purchased when the earliest data is available; this will be denoted by a superscript after the ticker symbol and described at the bottom of the table.
| Company | Symbol | Annualized Total Return | $1000 Invested is now worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | AAPL | 24.01% | $74,183.36 |
| Aflac | AFL | 15.54% | $18,016.30 |
| Avista | AVA | 8.86% | $5,468.75 |
| Baxter International | BAX | 12.14% | $9,907.72 |
| Bemis Company | BMS | 10.57% | $7,476.64 |
| BP | BP | 9.37% | $6,005.50 |
| Coca-Cola | KO | 8.89% | $5,497.18 |
| Cisco | CSCO | 15.30% | $17,276.92 |
| Chevron | CVX | 12.06% | $9,764.37 |
| General Electric | GE | 8.96% | $5,565.59 |
| Harris | HRS | 14.13% | $14,092.20 |
| Kinder-Morgan | KMI * | 9.91% | $1,291.22 |
| McDonalds | MCD | 11.94% | $9,554.44 |
| Visa | V † | 26.50% | $3,734.09 |
| Target | TGT | 14.32% | $14,561.36 |
| Wells Fargo | WFC | 12.81% | $11,161.46 |
| Johnson & Johnson | JNJ | 13.94% | $13,622.78 |
* KMI – Start date: February 11, 2011
† V – Start date: March 19, 2008
Total amount invested is $17,000 in 1993 (with the exceptions listed above) in the 17 stocks listed above would be worth $227,179.88 today, following 20-years of reinvestment of dividends and stock appreciation. That amounts to a percent increase of 1236.4%. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
Full disclosure: Long all the above mentioned companies.
The growing dividends and capital appreciation are very powerful friends. As far as JNJ from your example I bought the stock just three years ago and it already provided me with 107% gain (dividend + appreciation). Can you imagine what would happen after another 17 years ?
That’s awesome! I wish I had more cash available 3-4 years ago to have been able to buy more cheap stocks. Hopefully the last three years weren’t an anomaly (QE, etc) and those types of gains are sustainable. While I’ve bought into the concept of “getting rich slowly” with dividends and dividend growth companies, part of me wants to play some of the more risky options as well. In the future I might do this with at least a portion of my portfolio.
A friend of mine recently purchased a total of around $600 of Google call and put options that were expiring near Google’s recent earnings announcement. You know how the market reacted to that announcement…his put options expired worthless and his call options became worth $7000.