“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Starbucks Corp. (NASD: SBUX) back in 2014. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 09/09/2014 |
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| End date: | 09/06/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $38.56 | ||||
| End price/share: | $95.74 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 259.34 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 282.90 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.14 | ||||
| Total return: | 170.85% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 22.08% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $27,086.18 | ||||
The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 22.08%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $27,086.18 today (as of 09/06/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 170.85% (something to think about: how might SBUX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Starbucks Corp. paid investors a total of $5.14/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 1.44/share, we calculate that SBUX has a current yield of approximately 1.50%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.44 against the original $38.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.89%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you’ll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you’ll find two.” — Peter Lynch
