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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 Quanta Services, Inc. (NYSE: PWR)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.

Start date: 04/07/2016
$10,000

04/07/2016
$42,658

04/06/2021
End date: 04/06/2021
Start price/share: $21.84
End price/share: $92.15
Starting shares: 457.88
Ending shares: 462.95
Dividends reinvested/share: $0.48
Total return: 326.61%
Average annual return: 33.66%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $42,658.67

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 33.66%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $42,658.67 today (as of 04/06/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 326.61% (something to think about: how might PWR shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Quanta Services, Inc. paid investors a total of $0.48/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 .24/share, we calculate that PWR has a current yield of approximately 0.26%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .24 against the original $21.84/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.19%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“The older I get, the more I see a straight path where I want to go. If you’re going to hunt elephants, don’t get off the trail for a rabbit.” — T. Boone Pickens