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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 Albemarle Corp. (NYSE: ALB)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2014.

Start date: 12/22/2014
$10,000

12/22/2014
$12,596

12/19/2019
End date: 12/19/2019
Start price/share: $60.00
End price/share: $69.45
Starting shares: 166.67
Ending shares: 181.36
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.47
Total return: 25.96%
Average annual return: 4.73%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,596.37

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.73%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,596.37 today (as of 12/19/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 25.96% (something to think about: how might ALB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Albemarle Corp. paid investors a total of $6.47/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 1.47/share, we calculate that ALB has a current yield of approximately 2.12%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.47 against the original $60.00/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.53%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Sentimentality about an investments leads to lack of discipline.” — Sam Zell