“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 American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 04/29/2015 |
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| End date: | 04/28/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $77.16 | ||||
| End price/share: | $88.19 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 129.60 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 140.46 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.98 | ||||
| Total return: | 23.87% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.37% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,385.95 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.37%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,385.95 today (as of 04/28/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 23.87% (something to think about: how might AXP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Express Co. paid investors a total of $6.98/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 1.72/share, we calculate that AXP has a current yield of approximately 1.95%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $77.16/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.53%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Every once in a while, the market does something so stupid it takes your breath away.” — Jim Cramer
