“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2014, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about CMS Energy Corp (NYSE: CMS), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 04/28/2014 |
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| End date: | 04/25/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $30.25 | ||||
| End price/share: | $54.76 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 330.58 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 386.51 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.36 | ||||
| Total return: | 111.65% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.20% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $21,167.68 | ||||
The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $21,167.68 today (as of 04/25/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 111.65% (something to think about: how might CMS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that CMS Energy Corp paid investors a total of $6.36/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 1.53/share, we calculate that CMS has a current yield of approximately 2.79%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.53 against the original $30.25/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.22%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.” — Peter Lynch
