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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 Cimarex Energy Co (NYSE: XEC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 11/14/2014
$10,000

11/14/2014
$4,008

11/13/2019
End date: 11/13/2019
Start price/share: $117.56
End price/share: $45.77
Starting shares: 85.06
Ending shares: 87.58
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.52
Total return: -59.92%
Average annual return: -16.71%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $4,008.34

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -16.71%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $4,008.34 today (as of 11/13/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -59.92% (something to think about: how might XEC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Cimarex Energy Co paid investors a total of $2.52/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 .8/share, we calculate that XEC has a current yield of approximately 1.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .8 against the original $117.56/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.49%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that’s when the market is in the best possible hands.” — Victor Niederhoffer