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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 Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc (NYSE: ZBH)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

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

06/10/2014
$11,806

06/07/2019
End date: 06/07/2019
Start price/share: $106.60
End price/share: $120.73
Starting shares: 93.81
Ending shares: 97.77
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.66
Total return: 18.04%
Average annual return: 3.38%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,806.02

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.38%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,806.02 today (as of 06/07/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 18.04% (something to think about: how might ZBH shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc paid investors a total of $4.66/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 .96/share, we calculate that ZBH has a current yield of approximately 0.80%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .96 against the original $106.60/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.75%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The idea that a bell rings to signal when to get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I don’t know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.” — Jack Bogle