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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 SL Green Realty Corp (NYSE: SLG)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 10/22/2014
$10,000

10/22/2014
$8,551

10/21/2019
End date: 10/21/2019
Start price/share: $110.60
End price/share: $81.29
Starting shares: 90.42
Ending shares: 105.21
Dividends reinvested/share: $15.03
Total return: -14.48%
Average annual return: -3.08%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,551.99

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -3.08%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,551.99 today (as of 10/21/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -14.48% (something to think about: how might SLG shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that SL Green Realty Corp paid investors a total of $15.03/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 3.4/share, we calculate that SLG has a current yield of approximately 4.18%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.4 against the original $110.60/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.78%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.” — Peter Lynch