“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 CenturyLink Inc (NYSE: CTL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.
| Start date: | 08/13/2015 |
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| End date: | 08/12/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $27.97 | ||||
| End price/share: | $10.79 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 357.53 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 571.81 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.06 | ||||
| Total return: | -38.30% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -9.20% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $6,170.42 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -9.20%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $6,170.42 today (as of 08/12/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -38.30% (something to think about: how might CTL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that CenturyLink Inc paid investors a total of $9.06/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/share, we calculate that CTL has a current yield of approximately 9.27%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1 against the original $27.97/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 33.14%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Don’t look for the needle in the haystack, just buy the haystack.” — John Bogle
