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

Start date: 03/18/2015
$10,000

03/18/2015
$12,179

03/17/2020
End date: 03/17/2020
Start price/share: $127.49
End price/share: $155.09
Starting shares: 78.44
Ending shares: 78.54
Dividends reinvested/share: $0.20
Total return: 21.80%
Average annual return: 4.02%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,179.55

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.02%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,179.55 today (as of 03/17/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 21.80% (something to think about: how might CI shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Cigna Corp paid investors a total of $0.20/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 .04/share, we calculate that CI has a current yield of approximately 0.03%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .04 against the original $127.49/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.02%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — John Maynard Keynes