“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 Archer Daniels Midland Co. (NYSE: ADM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 06/12/2015 |
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| End date: | 06/11/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $51.91 | ||||
| End price/share: | $38.60 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 192.64 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 225.32 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.50 | ||||
| Total return: | -13.03% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -2.75% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $8,697.91 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -2.75%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,697.91 today (as of 06/11/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -13.03% (something to think about: how might ADM shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Archer Daniels Midland Co. paid investors a total of $6.50/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 1.44/share, we calculate that ADM has a current yield of approximately 3.73%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.44 against the original $51.91/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.19%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.” — Benjamin Graham
