“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 Mattel Inc (NASD: MAT)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 05/14/2014 |
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| End date: | 05/13/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $39.27 | ||||
| End price/share: | $11.10 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 254.65 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 306.17 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.09 | ||||
| Total return: | -66.02% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -19.41% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $3,399.43 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -19.41%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $3,399.43 today (as of 05/13/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -66.02% (something to think about: how might MAT shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Mattel Inc paid investors a total of $5.09/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 .6/share, we calculate that MAT has a current yield of approximately 0.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .6 against the original $39.27/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.00%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“All intelligent investing is value investing: acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.” — Charlie Munger
