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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

This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?

For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2014, investors considering an investment into shares of Comcast Corp (NASD: CMCSA) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.

Start date: 11/06/2014
$10,000

11/06/2014
$17,521

11/05/2019
End date: 11/05/2019
Start price/share: $27.69
End price/share: $44.28
Starting shares: 361.14
Ending shares: 395.67
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.18
Total return: 75.20%
Average annual return: 11.87%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $17,521.38

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.87%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $17,521.38 today (as of 11/05/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 75.20% (something to think about: how might CMCSA shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 5 years, Comcast Corp has paid $3.18/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .84/share, we calculate that CMCSA has a current yield of approximately 1.90%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .84 against the original $27.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.86%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.” — Seth Klarman