“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) back in 2014. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 12/23/2014 |
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| End date: | 12/20/2019 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $94.69 | ||||
| End price/share: | $146.88 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 105.61 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 113.30 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.96 | ||||
| Total return: | 66.42% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.74% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,644.85 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.74%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,644.85 today (as of 12/20/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 66.42% (something to think about: how might DIS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Walt Disney Co. paid investors a total of $7.96/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 1.76/share, we calculate that DIS 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 1.76 against the original $94.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.27%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“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
