“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 Seagate Technology plc (NASD: STX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.
| Start date: | 11/07/2014 |
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| End date: | 11/06/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $61.56 | ||||
| End price/share: | $57.84 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 162.44 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 215.75 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.70 | ||||
| Total return: | 24.79% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.53% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,479.72 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.53%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,479.72 today (as of 11/06/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 24.79% (something to think about: how might STX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Seagate Technology plc paid investors a total of $11.70/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 STX has a current yield of approximately 4.50%. 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 $61.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.31%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“I made my money by selling too soon.” — Bernard Baruch
