“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Ecolab Inc (NYSE: ECL) back in 2015: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 08/03/2015 |
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| End date: | 07/31/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $115.28 | ||||
| End price/share: | $187.08 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 86.75 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 91.79 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.10 | ||||
| Total return: | 71.73% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.43% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $17,174.41 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.43%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $17,174.41 today (as of 07/31/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 71.73% (something to think about: how might ECL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ecolab Inc paid investors a total of $8.10/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 1.88/share, we calculate that ECL has a current yield of approximately 1.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.88 against the original $115.28/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.87%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” — Oscar Wilde
