“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2015, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about McCormick & Co Inc (NYSE: MKC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 04/02/2015 |
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| End date: | 04/01/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $76.86 | ||||
| End price/share: | $138.62 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 130.11 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 141.46 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.38 | ||||
| Total return: | 96.09% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 14.41% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $19,610.11 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.41%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $19,610.11 today (as of 04/01/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 96.09% (something to think about: how might MKC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that McCormick & Co Inc paid investors a total of $9.38/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 2.48/share, we calculate that MKC has a current yield of approximately 1.79%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.48 against the original $76.86/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.33%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“All the opportunity in the world means nothing if you don’t actually pull the trigger.” — Sam Zell
