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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 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 Applied Materials, Inc. (NASD: AMAT), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.

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

06/06/2014
$20,174

06/05/2019
End date: 06/05/2019
Start price/share: $21.82
End price/share: $40.59
Starting shares: 458.30
Ending shares: 497.03
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.51
Total return: 101.74%
Average annual return: 15.07%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $20,174.86

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 15.07%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $20,174.86 today (as of 06/05/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 101.74% (something to think about: how might AMAT shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Applied Materials, Inc. paid investors a total of $2.51/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 .84/share, we calculate that AMAT has a current yield of approximately 2.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .84 against the original $21.82/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.49%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.” — Benjamin Graham