“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 2015, investors considering an investment into shares of Berkley Corp (NYSE: WRB) 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: | 02/09/2015 |
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| End date: | 02/06/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $33.09 | ||||
| End price/share: | $77.18 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 302.21 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 337.37 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.43 | ||||
| Total return: | 160.38% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 21.12% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $26,038.94 | ||||
The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.12%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $26,038.94 today (as of 02/06/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 160.38% (something to think about: how might WRB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Many investors out there refuse to own any stock that lacks a dividend; in the case of Berkley Corp, investors have received $5.43/share in dividends these past 5 years examined in the exercise above. This means total return was driven not just by share price, but also by the dividends received (and what the investor did with those dividends). For this exercise, what we’ve done with the dividends is to assume they are reinvestted — i.e. used to purchase additional shares (the calculations use closing price on ex-date).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .44/share, we calculate that WRB has a current yield of approximately 0.57%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .44 against the original $33.09/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.72%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“It’s not always easy to do what’s not popular, but that’s where you make your money. Buy stocks that look bad to less careful investors and hang on until their real value is recognized.” — John Neff
