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

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 Colgate-Palmolive Co. (NYSE: CL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 01/23/2015
$10,000

01/23/2015
$11,808

01/22/2020
End date: 01/22/2020
Start price/share: $67.14
End price/share: $70.53
Starting shares: 148.94
Ending shares: 167.40
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.08
Total return: 18.07%
Average annual return: 3.38%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,808.17

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.38%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,808.17 today (as of 01/22/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 18.07% (something to think about: how might CL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Colgate-Palmolive Co. paid investors a total of $8.08/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 1.72/share, we calculate that CL has a current yield of approximately 2.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $67.14/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.63%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.” — Jim Rogers