What I said pertains to a one-time investment. If there are multiple purchases of JNJ at diffferent time, or multiple sells of JNJ at different times, it becomes a more complicated problem, known as ROI (rate of interest). I won’t go into the details, but many years ago, I once wrote such a program.

Happy Trails,
and GOOD luck with JNJ

PS: for anybody else reading this BLOG, there has been some recent speculation that JNJ won’t perform as well as it has in the past (as of Dec 2011). The link for this is information is:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/309371-why-it-may-be-time-to-drop-johnson-johnson-from-your-long-term-dividend-portfolio

Which was published Dec 2011. The basic jist of this article is that the dividend growth has slowed down over the last 3 years, ending in 2011. But it could be a sign of the economic problems we’ve had. I’ve noticed that VALUE mutual funds have not done so well lately, either.

You can track the performance of JNJ, including splits and dividends by going to yahoo.com, and looking up the historical data. The column labelled “adjusted price” is what you want use for calculating the rate of growth. For example, if the oldest price is 33.33, and the latest price is $100.00, then to calculate the percent per year, first divide 100.00/33.33 = 3.00. This means its been a 3-fold increase or a gain of +200%. To find the annual gain (percentage growth per year), raise that number to (1/Years). So if it were 5 years, calculate 3.00^(.2) = 1.24. This representa a gain of 24% per year (starting with 1.24, subtract 1, and multiply by 100, to get 24).

Hope this helps you. Also, beware of the charts in Yahoo.com. I am not certain if the JNJ chart has dividends/splits included or NOT. THere OUGHT to be a way on yahoo.com to control it. Old help pages in Yahoo alluded to a feature that allowed you to include/exclude dividends/splits, but this feature appears to be removed as of Dec 2011. Lets hope Yahoo programmers read this, and again add that feature.