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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 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 TE Connectivity Ltd (NYSE: TEL) 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: 10/13/2014
$10,000

10/13/2014
$18,938

10/10/2019
End date: 10/10/2019
Start price/share: $51.47
End price/share: $88.07
Starting shares: 194.29
Ending shares: 215.08
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.66
Total return: 89.42%
Average annual return: 13.64%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $18,938.77

The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.64%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $18,938.77 today (as of 10/10/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 89.42% (something to think about: how might TEL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that TE Connectivity Ltd paid investors a total of $7.66/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 1.84/share, we calculate that TEL has a current yield of approximately 2.09%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.84 against the original $51.47/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.06%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you’re looking for a home run, a great investment for five years or 10 years or more, then the only way to beat this enormous fog that covers the future is to identify a long-term trend that will give a particular business some sort of edge.” — Ralph Wanger