“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2014, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about American Electric Power Co Inc (NYSE: AEP), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 12/02/2014 |
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| End date: | 11/29/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $58.36 | ||||
| End price/share: | $91.35 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 171.35 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 204.35 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $12.05 | ||||
| Total return: | 86.67% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 13.31% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,665.68 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 13.31%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $18,665.68 today (as of 11/29/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 86.67% (something to think about: how might AEP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Electric Power Co Inc paid investors a total of $12.05/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 2.8/share, we calculate that AEP has a current yield of approximately 3.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.8 against the original $58.36/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.26%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion.” — Alfred Rappaport
