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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 Exxon Mobil Corp (NYSE: XOM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 12/14/2015
$10,000

12/14/2015
$7,297

12/11/2020
End date: 12/11/2020
Start price/share: $76.03
End price/share: $43.80
Starting shares: 131.53
Ending shares: 166.64
Dividends reinvested/share: $16.18
Total return: -27.01%
Average annual return: -6.11%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $7,297.46

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -6.11%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $7,297.46 today (as of 12/11/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -27.01% (something to think about: how might XOM shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Exxon Mobil Corp paid investors a total of $16.18/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 3.48/share, we calculate that XOM has a current yield of approximately 7.95%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.48 against the original $76.03/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.46%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful.” — Warren Buffett