Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

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

— Warren Buffett

The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of PerkinElmer, Inc. (NYSE: PKI) back in 2014. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 06/17/2014
$10,000

06/17/2014
$20,547

06/14/2019
End date: 06/14/2019
Start price/share: $46.34
End price/share: $92.94
Starting shares: 215.80
Ending shares: 221.07
Dividends reinvested/share: $1.40
Total return: 105.46%
Average annual return: 15.51%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $20,547.30

The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $20,547.30 today (as of 06/14/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 105.46% (something to think about: how might PKI shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PerkinElmer, Inc. paid investors a total of $1.40/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 .28/share, we calculate that PKI has a current yield of approximately 0.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .28 against the original $46.34/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.65%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Never test the depth of a river with both feet.” — Warren Buffett