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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

This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?

For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2016, investors considering an investment into shares of UnitedHealth Group Inc (NYSE: UNH) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.

Start date: 11/07/2016
$10,000

11/07/2016
$34,706

11/04/2021
End date: 11/04/2021
Start price/share: $141.93
End price/share: $456.76
Starting shares: 70.46
Ending shares: 75.99
Dividends reinvested/share: $20.07
Total return: 247.10%
Average annual return: 28.31%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $34,706.65

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 28.31%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $34,706.65 today (as of 11/04/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 247.10% (something to think about: how might UNH shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that UnitedHealth Group Inc paid investors a total of $20.07/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 5.8/share, we calculate that UNH has a current yield of approximately 1.27%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 5.8 against the original $141.93/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.89%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Investors should purchase stocks like they purchase groceries, not like they purchase perfume.” — Benjamin Graham