“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 Kimberly-Clark Corp. (NYSE: KMB)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.
| Start date: | 01/11/2016 |
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| End date: | 01/08/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $125.71 | ||||
| End price/share: | $131.76 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 79.55 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 93.12 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $19.96 | ||||
| Total return: | 22.70% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 4.18% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,270.80 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.18%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,270.80 today (as of 01/08/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 22.70% (something to think about: how might KMB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Kimberly-Clark Corp. paid investors a total of $19.96/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 4.28/share, we calculate that KMB has a current yield of approximately 3.25%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.28 against the original $125.71/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.59%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Taking risks is really the only way to consistently achieve above-average returns.” — Sam Zell
