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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 Molson Coors Beverage Co (NYSE: TAP)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.

Start date: 04/14/2016
$10,000

04/14/2016
$5,990

04/13/2021
End date: 04/13/2021
Start price/share: $95.73
End price/share: $51.74
Starting shares: 104.46
Ending shares: 115.78
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.04
Total return: -40.10%
Average annual return: -9.74%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $5,990.69

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -9.74%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $5,990.69 today (as of 04/13/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -40.10% (something to think about: how might TAP shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Molson Coors Beverage Co paid investors a total of $7.04/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 2.28/share, we calculate that TAP has a current yield of approximately 4.41%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.28 against the original $95.73/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.61%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“In the long run, we are all dead.” — John Maynard Keynes