“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Micron Technology Inc. (NASD: MU) back in 2016. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 10/05/2016 |
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| End date: | 10/04/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $17.70 | ||||
| End price/share: | $70.62 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 564.97 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 565.77 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $0.10 | ||||
| Total return: | 299.55% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 31.92% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $39,953.35 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 31.92%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $39,953.35 today (as of 10/04/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 299.55% (something to think about: how might MU shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Micron Technology Inc. paid investors a total of $0.10/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/share, we calculate that MU has a current yield of approximately 0.57%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .4 against the original $17.70/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.22%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“If a speculator is correct half of the time, he is hitting a good average. Even being right 3 or 4 times out of 10 should yield a person a fortune if he has the sense to cut his losses quickly on the ventures where he is wrong.” — Bernard Baruch
