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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 Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 11/09/2015
$10,000

11/09/2015
$11,121

11/06/2020
End date: 11/06/2020
Start price/share: $196.76
End price/share: $201.26
Starting shares: 50.82
Ending shares: 55.27
Dividends reinvested/share: $17.20
Total return: 11.24%
Average annual return: 2.15%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,121.58

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.15%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,121.58 today (as of 11/06/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 11.24% (something to think about: how might GS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Goldman Sachs Group paid investors a total of $17.20/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 5/share, we calculate that GS has a current yield of approximately 2.48%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $196.76/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.26%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Ensure management’s interests are aligned with shareholders.” — Sam Zell