“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 Occidental Petroleum Corp (NYSE: OXY)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 09/19/2014 |
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| End date: | 09/18/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $93.61 | ||||
| End price/share: | $44.62 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 106.83 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 134.43 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $15.21 | ||||
| Total return: | -40.02% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -9.72% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $5,997.33 | ||||
The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -9.72%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $5,997.33 today (as of 09/18/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -40.02% (something to think about: how might OXY shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Occidental Petroleum Corp paid investors a total of $15.21/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 3.16/share, we calculate that OXY has a current yield of approximately 7.08%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.16 against the original $93.61/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.56%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” — Robert Arnott
