“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 AmerisourceBergen Corp. (NYSE: ABC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 07/16/2014 |
|
|||
| End date: | 07/15/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $72.97 | ||||
| End price/share: | $89.93 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 137.04 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 148.35 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.94 | ||||
| Total return: | 33.41% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.93% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $13,338.13 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.93%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $13,338.13 today (as of 07/15/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 33.41% (something to think about: how might ABC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that AmerisourceBergen Corp. paid investors a total of $6.94/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 1.6/share, we calculate that ABC has a current yield of approximately 1.78%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $72.97/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.44%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“The greater the passive income you can build, the freer you will become.” — Todd Fleming
ABC
