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 Wynn Resorts Ltd (NASD: WYNN)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 03/11/2015
$10,000

03/11/2015
$8,001

03/10/2020
End date: 03/10/2020
Start price/share: $126.63
End price/share: $90.17
Starting shares: 78.97
Ending shares: 88.71
Dividends reinvested/share: $13.00
Total return: -20.01%
Average annual return: -4.36%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,001.01

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -4.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,001.01 today (as of 03/10/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -20.01% (something to think about: how might WYNN shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Wynn Resorts Ltd paid investors a total of $13.00/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 4/share, we calculate that WYNN has a current yield of approximately 4.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4 against the original $126.63/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.51%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.” — Benjamin Graham