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

Start date: 07/14/2014
$10,000

07/14/2014
$7,854

07/11/2019
End date: 07/11/2019
Start price/share: $190.41
End price/share: $143.82
Starting shares: 52.52
Ending shares: 54.62
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.12
Total return: -21.44%
Average annual return: -4.72%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $7,854.60

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -4.72%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $7,854.60 today (as of 07/11/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -21.44% (something to think about: how might MCK shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that McKesson Corp paid investors a total of $6.12/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 1.56/share, we calculate that MCK has a current yield of approximately 1.08%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.56 against the original $190.41/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.57%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Never is there a better time to buy a stock than when a basically sound company, for whatever reason, temporarily falls out of favor with the investment community.” — Geraldine Weiss