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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Pinnacle West Capital Corp (NYSE: PNW) back in 2016: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 03/22/2016
$10,000

03/22/2016
$13,227

03/19/2021
End date: 03/19/2021
Start price/share: $72.63
End price/share: $80.79
Starting shares: 137.68
Ending shares: 163.71
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.39
Total return: 32.26%
Average annual return: 5.76%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $13,227.38

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.76%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $13,227.38 today (as of 03/19/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 32.26% (something to think about: how might PNW shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Pinnacle West Capital Corp paid investors a total of $14.39/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 3.32/share, we calculate that PNW has a current yield of approximately 4.11%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.32 against the original $72.63/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.66%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” — Warren Buffett