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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

One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a five year holding period for an investor who was considering 3M Co (NYSE: MMM) back in 2016, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.

Start date: 07/13/2016
$10,000

07/13/2016
$12,933

07/12/2021
End date: 07/12/2021
Start price/share: $179.21
End price/share: $199.98
Starting shares: 55.80
Ending shares: 64.69
Dividends reinvested/share: $26.96
Total return: 29.36%
Average annual return: 5.28%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,933.90

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.28%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,933.90 today (as of 07/12/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 29.36% (something to think about: how might MMM shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that 3M Co paid investors a total of $26.96/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 5.92/share, we calculate that MMM has a current yield of approximately 2.96%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.92 against the original $179.21/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.65%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn’t.” — Seth Klarman