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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 Xerox Holdings Corp (NYSE: XRX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 01/02/2015
$10,000

01/02/2015
$11,950

12/31/2019
End date: 12/31/2019
Start price/share: $36.24
End price/share: $36.87
Starting shares: 275.94
Ending shares: 324.15
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.56
Total return: 19.52%
Average annual return: 3.63%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,950.47

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.63%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,950.47 today (as of 12/31/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 19.52% (something to think about: how might XRX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Xerox Holdings Corp paid investors a total of $4.56/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/share, we calculate that XRX has a current yield of approximately 2.71%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $36.24/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.48%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“The right time for a company to finance its growth is not when it needs capital, but rather when the market is most receptive to providing capital.” — Michael Milken