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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 Digital Realty Trust Inc (NYSE: DLR), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.

Start date: 08/20/2014
$10,000

08/20/2014
$22,703

08/19/2019
End date: 08/19/2019
Start price/share: $66.94
End price/share: $124.33
Starting shares: 149.39
Ending shares: 182.64
Dividends reinvested/share: $18.50
Total return: 127.08%
Average annual return: 17.82%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $22,703.62

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 17.82%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $22,703.62 today (as of 08/19/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 127.08% (something to think about: how might DLR shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Digital Realty Trust Inc paid investors a total of $18.50/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 4.32/share, we calculate that DLR has a current yield of approximately 3.47%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.32 against the original $66.94/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.18%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“There is nothing riskier than the widespread perception that there is no risk.” — Howard Marks