Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 Xerox Holdings Corp (NYSE: XRX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 11/05/2015
$10,000

11/05/2015
$8,542

11/04/2020
End date: 11/04/2020
Start price/share: $25.36
End price/share: $18.25
Starting shares: 394.32
Ending shares: 468.12
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.51
Total return: -14.57%
Average annual return: -3.10%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,542.43

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -3.10%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,542.43 today (as of 11/04/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -14.57% (something to think about: how might XRX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Xerox Holdings Corp paid investors a total of $4.51/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 XRX has a current yield of approximately 5.48%. 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 $25.36/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 21.61%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“In the long run, we are all dead.” — John Maynard Keynes