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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 investment philosophy practiced by Warren Buffett calls for investors to take a long-term horizon when making an investment, such as a five year holding period (or even longer), and reconsider making the investment in the first place if unable to envision holding the stock for at least five years. Today, we look at how such a long-term strategy would have done for investors in Verizon Communications Inc (NYSE: VZ) back in 2014, holding through to today.

Start date: 11/13/2014
$10,000

11/13/2014
$14,550

11/12/2019
End date: 11/12/2019
Start price/share: $51.20
End price/share: $59.32
Starting shares: 195.31
Ending shares: 245.26
Dividends reinvested/share: $11.61
Total return: 45.49%
Average annual return: 7.79%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $14,550.98

The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.79%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $14,550.98 today (as of 11/12/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 45.49% (something to think about: how might VZ 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, Verizon Communications Inc has paid $11.61/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 2.46/share, we calculate that VZ has a current yield of approximately 4.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.46 against the original $51.20/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 8.11%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“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