“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2014, investors considering an investment into shares of PepsiCo Inc (NASD: PEP) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 12/19/2014 |
|
|||
| End date: | 12/18/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $95.44 | ||||
| End price/share: | $135.97 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 104.78 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 121.39 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $16.28 | ||||
| Total return: | 65.06% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.54% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,504.31 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.54%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,504.31 today (as of 12/18/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 65.06% (something to think about: how might PEP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that PepsiCo Inc paid investors a total of $16.28/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 3.82/share, we calculate that PEP has a current yield of approximately 2.81%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.82 against the original $95.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.94%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can’t trade.” — Bruce Kovner
