“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 Host Hotels & Resorts Inc (NYSE: HST)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 03/10/2015 |
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| End date: | 03/09/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $20.26 | ||||
| End price/share: | $12.07 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 493.58 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 622.48 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $4.20 | ||||
| Total return: | -24.87% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -5.55% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $7,515.22 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -5.55%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $7,515.22 today (as of 03/09/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -24.87% (something to think about: how might HST shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Host Hotels & Resorts Inc paid investors a total of $4.20/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 .8/share, we calculate that HST has a current yield of approximately 6.34%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .8 against the original $20.26/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 31.29%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.” — Benjamin Graham
