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“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a five year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Flowserve Corp (NYSE: FLS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 04/10/2014
$10,000

04/10/2014
$6,764

04/09/2019
End date: 04/09/2019
Start price/share: $76.13
End price/share: $47.66
Starting shares: 131.35
Ending shares: 141.94
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.67
Total return: -32.35%
Average annual return: -7.52%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $6,764.55

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -7.52%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $6,764.55 today (as of 04/09/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -32.35% (something to think about: how might FLS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Flowserve Corp paid investors a total of $3.67/share in dividends over the 5 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 .76/share, we calculate that FLS has a current yield of approximately 1.59%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .76 against the original $76.13/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.09%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.” — Larry Summers