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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 Philip Morris International Inc (NYSE: PM)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2016.

Start date: 11/03/2016
$10,000

11/03/2016
$12,726

11/02/2021
End date: 11/02/2021
Start price/share: $96.23
End price/share: $94.02
Starting shares: 103.92
Ending shares: 135.37
Dividends reinvested/share: $22.76
Total return: 27.28%
Average annual return: 4.94%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,726.39

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.94%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,726.39 today (as of 11/02/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 27.28% (something to think about: how might PM shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Philip Morris International Inc paid investors a total of $22.76/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/share, we calculate that PM has a current yield of approximately 5.32%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5 against the original $96.23/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.53%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Never is there a better time to buy a stock than when a basically sound company, for whatever reason, temporarily falls out of favor with the investment community.” — Geraldine Weiss