“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 ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 09/09/2014 |
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| End date: | 09/06/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $78.96 | ||||
| End price/share: | $53.63 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 126.65 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 145.55 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.80 | ||||
| Total return: | -21.94% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -4.84% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $7,805.31 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -4.84%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $7,805.31 today (as of 09/06/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -21.94% (something to think about: how might COP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that ConocoPhillips paid investors a total of $7.80/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 1.22/share, we calculate that COP has a current yield of approximately 2.27%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.22 against the original $78.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.87%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“The most important thing about an investment philosophy is that you have one.” — David Booth
