“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 HollyFrontier Corp (NYSE: HFC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 09/16/2014 |
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| End date: | 09/13/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $46.53 | ||||
| End price/share: | $51.38 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 214.92 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 257.51 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.08 | ||||
| Total return: | 32.31% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.77% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $13,233.63 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.77%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $13,233.63 today (as of 09/13/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 32.31% (something to think about: how might HFC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that HollyFrontier Corp paid investors a total of $7.08/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 1.32/share, we calculate that HFC has a current yield of approximately 2.57%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.32 against the original $46.53/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.52%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“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
