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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 American Tower Corp (NYSE: AMT)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 06/09/2014
$10,000

06/09/2014
$26,135

06/06/2019
End date: 06/06/2019
Start price/share: $89.66
End price/share: $212.70
Starting shares: 111.53
Ending shares: 122.89
Dividends reinvested/share: $11.73
Total return: 161.39%
Average annual return: 21.21%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $26,135.72

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.21%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $26,135.72 today (as of 06/06/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 161.39% (something to think about: how might AMT shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that American Tower Corp paid investors a total of $11.73/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 3.68/share, we calculate that AMT has a current yield of approximately 1.73%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.68 against the original $89.66/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.93%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you don’t study any companies, you have the same success buying stocks as you do in a poker game if you bet without looking at your cards.” — Peter Lynch