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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 Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASD: ATVI)? 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
$24,730

03/17/2020
End date: 03/17/2020
Start price/share: $23.58
End price/share: $56.16
Starting shares: 424.09
Ending shares: 440.29
Dividends reinvested/share: $1.50
Total return: 147.26%
Average annual return: 19.84%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $24,730.01

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 19.84%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $24,730.01 today (as of 03/17/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 147.26% (something to think about: how might ATVI shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Activision Blizzard, Inc. paid investors a total of $1.50/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 .41/share, we calculate that ATVI has a current yield of approximately 0.73%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .41 against the original $23.58/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.10%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett