“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 Willis Towers Watson Public Ltd Co (NASD: WLTW)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 10/13/2014 |
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| End date: | 10/10/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $268.69 | ||||
| End price/share: | $187.69 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 37.22 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 42.70 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $36.87 | ||||
| Total return: | -19.86% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -4.34% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $8,012.30 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -4.34%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,012.30 today (as of 10/10/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -19.86% (something to think about: how might WLTW shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Willis Towers Watson Public Ltd Co paid investors a total of $36.87/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 2.6/share, we calculate that WLTW has a current yield of approximately 1.39%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.6 against the original $268.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.52%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“In the long run, we are all dead.” — John Maynard Keynes
