“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 General Mills Inc (NYSE: GIS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 09/26/2014 |
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| End date: | 09/25/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $50.28 | ||||
| End price/share: | $54.17 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 198.89 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 237.02 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.37 | ||||
| Total return: | 28.39% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.13% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,842.02 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.13%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,842.02 today (as of 09/25/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 28.39% (something to think about: how might GIS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that General Mills Inc paid investors a total of $9.37/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 1.96/share, we calculate that GIS has a current yield of approximately 3.62%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.96 against the original $50.28/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.20%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.” — Seth Klarman
