“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 DuPont (NYSE: DD)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 03/04/2015 |
|
|||
| End date: | 03/03/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $99.64 | ||||
| End price/share: | $43.64 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 100.36 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 116.25 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $16.39 | ||||
| Total return: | -49.27% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -12.69% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $5,071.76 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -12.69%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $5,071.76 today (as of 03/03/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -49.27% (something to think about: how might DD shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that DuPont paid investors a total of $16.39/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 1.2/share, we calculate that DD has a current yield of approximately 2.75%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.2 against the original $99.64/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.76%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Though tempting, trying to time the market is a loser’s game.” — Christopher Davis
