“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 Delta Air Lines Inc (NYSE: DAL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.
| Start date: | 11/04/2016 |
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| End date: | 11/03/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $42.88 | ||||
| End price/share: | $41.24 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 233.21 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 253.56 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $4.44 | ||||
| Total return: | 4.57% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 0.90% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $10,458.17 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.90%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $10,458.17 today (as of 11/03/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 4.57% (something to think about: how might DAL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Delta Air Lines Inc paid investors a total of $4.44/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 1.61/share, we calculate that DAL has a current yield of approximately 3.90%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.61 against the original $42.88/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.10%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“A risk-reward ratio is important, but so is an aggravation-satisfaction ratio.” — Muriel Siebert
