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“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 KeyCorp (NYSE: KEY)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 10/15/2015
$10,000

10/15/2015
$11,204

10/14/2020
End date: 10/14/2020
Start price/share: $13.31
End price/share: $12.67
Starting shares: 751.31
Ending shares: 884.31
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.61
Total return: 12.04%
Average annual return: 2.30%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,204.83

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.30%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,204.83 today (as of 10/14/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 12.04% (something to think about: how might KEY shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that KeyCorp paid investors a total of $2.61/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 .74/share, we calculate that KEY has a current yield of approximately 5.84%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .74 against the original $13.31/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 43.88%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep.” — Robert Kiyosaki