Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 Microchip Technology Inc (NASD: MCHP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 03/17/2015
$10,000

03/17/2015
$12,469

03/16/2020
End date: 03/16/2020
Start price/share: $49.73
End price/share: $55.77
Starting shares: 201.09
Ending shares: 223.59
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.25
Total return: 24.70%
Average annual return: 4.51%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,469.29

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.51%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,469.29 today (as of 03/16/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 24.70% (something to think about: how might MCHP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Microchip Technology Inc paid investors a total of $7.25/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 1.468/share, we calculate that MCHP has a current yield of approximately 2.63%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.468 against the original $49.73/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.29%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The most important three words in investing is: “I don’t know.” If someone doesn’t say that to you then they are lying.” — James Altucher