Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 IDEX Corporation (NYSE: IEX) 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: 12/16/2014
$10,000

12/16/2014
$24,406

12/13/2019
End date: 12/13/2019
Start price/share: $73.62
End price/share: $167.37
Starting shares: 135.83
Ending shares: 145.83
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.62
Total return: 144.08%
Average annual return: 19.56%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $24,406.44

The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.56%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $24,406.44 today (as of 12/13/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 144.08% (something to think about: how might IEX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that IDEX Corporation paid investors a total of $7.62/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/share, we calculate that IEX has a current yield of approximately 1.20%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $73.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.63%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.” — Peter Lynch