“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 Stryker Corp (NYSE: SYK)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 01/29/2015 |
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| End date: | 01/28/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $93.68 | ||||
| End price/share: | $214.20 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 106.75 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 113.69 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.79 | ||||
| Total return: | 143.53% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 19.48% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $24,348.72 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.48%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $24,348.72 today (as of 01/28/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 143.53% (something to think about: how might SYK shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Stryker Corp paid investors a total of $8.79/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 2.3/share, we calculate that SYK has a current yield of approximately 1.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.3 against the original $93.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.14%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn’t.” — Seth Klarman
