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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 L3Harris Technologies Inc (NYSE: LHX)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.

Start date: 09/19/2016
$10,000

09/19/2016
$26,953

09/16/2021
End date: 09/16/2021
Start price/share: $89.52
End price/share: $221.03
Starting shares: 111.71
Ending shares: 121.96
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.57
Total return: 169.57%
Average annual return: 21.96%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $26,953.47

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.96%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $26,953.47 today (as of 09/16/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 169.57% (something to think about: how might LHX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that L3Harris Technologies Inc paid investors a total of $14.57/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 4.08/share, we calculate that LHX has a current yield of approximately 1.85%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.08 against the original $89.52/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.07%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban