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“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 Williams Cos Inc (NYSE: WMB)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 09/29/2014
$10,000

09/29/2014
$5,762

09/26/2019
End date: 09/26/2019
Start price/share: $55.99
End price/share: $24.13
Starting shares: 178.60
Ending shares: 238.76
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.40
Total return: -42.39%
Average annual return: -10.45%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $5,762.23

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -10.45%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $5,762.23 today (as of 09/26/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -42.39% (something to think about: how might WMB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Williams Cos Inc paid investors a total of $8.40/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 1.52/share, we calculate that WMB has a current yield of approximately 6.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.52 against the original $55.99/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 11.25%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Never test the depth of a river with both feet.” — Warren Buffett