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

Start date: 11/04/2016
$10,000

11/04/2016
$9,159

11/03/2021
End date: 11/03/2021
Start price/share: $23.76
End price/share: $18.28
Starting shares: 420.88
Ending shares: 500.99
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.96
Total return: -8.42%
Average annual return: -1.74%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $9,159.75

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -1.74%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $9,159.75 today (as of 11/03/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -8.42% (something to think about: how might HBI shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that HanesBrands Inc paid investors a total of $2.96/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 .6/share, we calculate that HBI has a current yield of approximately 3.28%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .6 against the original $23.76/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 13.80%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“As long as you enjoy investing, you’ll be willing to do the homework and stay in the game.” — Jim Cramer