“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 Nucor Corp. (NYSE: NUE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
Start date: | 09/22/2014 |
|
|||
End date: | 09/19/2019 | ||||
Start price/share: | $56.96 | ||||
End price/share: | $52.72 | ||||
Starting shares: | 175.56 | ||||
Ending shares: | 202.91 | ||||
Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.59 | ||||
Total return: | 6.97% | ||||
Average annual return: | 1.36% | ||||
Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
Ending investment: | $10,697.96 |
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 1.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $10,697.96 today (as of 09/19/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 6.97% (something to think about: how might NUE shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Nucor Corp. paid investors a total of $7.59/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 NUE has a current yield of approximately 3.03%. 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 $56.96/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.32%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Smart investing doesn’t consist of buying good assets but of buying assets well. This is a very, very important distinction that very, very few people understand.” — Howard Marks